Residents of an area where hundreds were massacred at the weekend near Nigeria's city of Jos returned home early Wednesday having fled overnight gunfire, a witness said.

Speaking on the phone from her house in Bukka Uku, about four kilometres (three miles) south of Jos, Josephine Emmanuel said she and other villagers had taken cover in police barracks late Tuesday night after hearing gunfire.

However, it later emerged that soldiers had been firing into the air to disperse crowds of ethnic Berom youths that had built up after a Muslim Fulani man was arrested with a gun in the predominantly Christian neighbourhood.

"Because of the tension and anxiety in the area, we took it for a gunfight and left our homes for the police barracks," Josephine Emmanuel, a resident of Bukka Uku, told AFP.

"We returned home when it became clear what the gunshots were for," she said. "Soldiers are still around to ensure nothing happens".

The area was the scene of an orgy of violence on Sunday which claimed hundreds of mainly Christian lives in a reported revenge attack by the mainly Muslim Fulani ethnic group.