Zangon-Kataf, a market town in southern Kaduna State, sits at the political fault line between the predominantly Christian Atyap (Kataf) indigenes and the Hausa-Fulani Muslim trading community that has lived in the town for over a century. The immediate trigger of the 1992 crisis was a Kaduna State Government decision to relocate the market from a Hausa-occupied site to a new site on Atyap land — an effort, the State argued, to give the indigenous community direct revenue from market trade.
The first violence broke out on 6 February 1992, when Hausa traders protested the relocation. Fighting continued sporadically through February and March. On 15–16 May 1992 a second, much larger wave of violence broke out in Zangon-Kataf itself, killing an estimated 95 people, and then spread north to Kaduna and Zaria where reprisal killings on religious lines left several hundred Christians dead and a comparable number of Muslims killed in subsequent counter-reprisals. Conservative documented death toll across Zangon-Kataf, Kaduna and Zaria combined: approximately 1,500. Higher estimates by the [Justice Cudjoe Tribunal] and church bodies place the figure above 2,000.
The Babangida federal government convened the Justice Benedict Okadigbo Special Military Tribunal under Decree No. 2 of 1987 (Civil Disturbances Special Tribunal). The Tribunal sat without right of appeal, applied broad provisions of treasonable felony, and on 2 February 1993 sentenced Major-General Zamani Lekwot (the most senior Atyap military officer, a former Military Governor of Rivers State and Ambassador to Senegal) and six others to death by hanging. The sentences provoked international protest, an ICJ Geneva intervention, and an Amnesty International campaign. President Babangida commuted the death sentences to five years' imprisonment in 1995; Lekwot was finally released in 1996 after Abacha's reconstitution of the case.
The Zangon-Kataf crisis became the template for two later patterns. First, the use of military tribunals to try civilian communal violence with reduced due process — repeated in Plateau, Bauchi and Taraba through the 1990s and 2000s. Second, the use of indigene-settler distinctions in land and market allocation as a tool of state government — which the Justice Niki Tobi Panel report (1995) on Plateau State identified as the structural driver of recurrent crises. See also Jos Crises, Southern Kaduna killings.