Some 800,000 residents were forcibly evicted from their homes in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, over a four-year period to make way for development in the fast-growing city, a rights group said Thursday.

Many of those removed from their homes between 2003 and 2007 were not given due notice or other usual eviction rights. Some were sprayed with tear gas or beaten to force them to leave, the Switzerland-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions said in a new report.

The group _ providing a rare firm estimate of the number of people forced from their homes in Abuja _ called on the government officials to stop evictions it says are pushing many Nigerians further into poverty.

“These widespread and ongoing evictions have resulted in the massive displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, with a disastrous effect on health, education, employment and family cohesion,” said the group, which wrote its report in conjunction with Nigeria’s Social and Economic Rights Action Center.

“Nigeria has violated the right to adequate housing on a scale and with a persistence that is rarely seen anywhere else in the world,” it said.

Nigerian authorities were not immediately available for comment Thursday.

Nigeria in the 1970s began planning to move its capital from the swollen, southern city of Lagos to a new site in the geographical middle of the country.

As Abuja grew over the years, the city began to overwhelm nearby communities, and town planners in 2003 began using forced resettlement to allow for development.

The country of 140 million people now boasts a capital city that is better organized and far less congested and crime-ridden than many of its other metropolitan areas.

But human rights campaigners say this has come at the cost of hundreds of thousands of disrupted lives.

Many Abuja natives now live in teeming slums just over the border from what is known as the Federal Capital Territory, where property values and rents are far beyond the means of the average Nigerian.

The evicted residents have been campaigning for years for compensation from the government.