University students in south-west Nigeria have kidnapped and burnt to death five people from a rival institution.

Cult members from other schools invaded the polytechnic... five of them were captured and burnt to death by the students. The students seized members of a gang when they invaded the campus of Ondo State Polytechnic in retaliation for an attack on a female student.

The captured men were tied down, doused in petrol and set on fire, police said from the state capital Akure, adding an investigation had begun to find out more details.

The students had entered the campus in anger at an abduction of one of their female colleagues in the latest of a series of secret society killings and abuse in Ondo, a state about 200 kilometres (125 miles) from the Nigeria's commercial capital, Lagos.

Cults have permeated Nigerian higher education institutions since they came to prominence in the late 1980s.

A police spokesman said: "Cult members from other schools invaded the polytechnic... five of them were captured and burnt to death by the students."

Cults have tried to take power in Nigeria's universities, using a mixture of black magic and violence to intimidate. Hundreds of people have been killed in Nigeria's federal and regional universities and polytechnics since the early 1990s.