According to a Red Cross official the trouble started at a high school in the city of Bauchi, where a teacher allegedly confiscated a Muslim religious document that a female student was reading in class.
Residents of Bauchi told AFP that students beat up the teacher after assuming that she had confiscated the Koran. The student's peers went on the rampage in the school, destroying property and prompting school authorities to call in the police who only restored order after firing teargas.
Citing reports from the town, Red Cross disaster management official Adronicus Adeyemo told AFP what happened when the situation escalated. "It later spread to the town. Ten people died, six of them burnt and more than 40 others were injured, some of them with machetes," he said.
But Mr Adeyemo said the latest violence was not directly linked to Saturday's riots in northern Nigeria that claimed at least 24 lives, sparked by the publication of satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed by a Danish newspaper.
Religious violence between Christians and Muslims is not uncommon in Nigeria’s Muslim-dominated north. Since the country returned to democratic rule in 1999, several northern states imposed the Muslim sharia law.
Overall the nation’s 130-million-strong population is divided roughly equally between Muslims and Christians of a variety of sects and denominations.