KANO, Nigeria (AFP) -- Nigeria has arrested 17 policemen who were filmed apparently executing unarmed members of a radical Islamist sect during a deadly uprising last year, a police source said yesterday.

The arrest followed the February 9 broadcast of a five-minute video by Al-Jazeera satellite station showing policemen shooting dead unarmed young men and teenagers outside police headquarters in the northern city of Maiduguri.

The victims are believed to belong to Boko Haram, a Nigerian Islamist sect styled on Afghanistan's Taliban that was behind an uprising in north Nigeria last July in which more than 800 people died, most of them sect members.

"Seventeen policemen who appeared in the footage were apprehended here in Maiduguri on February 23 and transferred to the force headquarters in Abuja for interrogation and further investigation," a police source told AFP by telephone from Maiduguri.

He said the arrests were carried out on the orders of the Acting President Goodluck Jonathan "to investigate the case and take appropriate action".

Lagos-based private Channels television quoted deputy national police spokesman Yemi Ajayi as confirming the arrest.

The officers suspected of involvement were arrested by a special police squad and brought to police headquarters in Abuja for interrogation, he said.

The video footage was posted on a string of websites, downloaded to mobile phones and circulated around Africa's most populous country, sparking public outrage.

The clip shows police officers ordering unarmed young men, some on crutches, to lie face down and shooting them at close range while hordes of residents watched.

Some of the police were recognisable with name tags visibly displayed on their chests. One officer could be heard shouting "shoot him in the chest not the head, I want his heart".

Nigeria's lower house of parliament on February 10 set up a special task force to probe the killings and report its findings within two weeks.

Boko Haram leader Mohammed Yusuf, 39, was killed after being captured by security forces who put down the July uprising. President Umaru Yar'Adua subsequently ordered an investigation into the violence and Yusuf's killing.

The Nigerian Taliban emerged in 2004 when it set up a base dubbed Afghanistan on the border with Niger, from where it attacked police outposts.

Its membership is mainly drawn from university dropouts.

The north of Nigeria is majority Muslim, although large Christian minorities have settled in the main towns, raising tensions between the groups.

Since 1999 and the return of a civilian regime to Nigeria's central government, 12 northern states have introduced Islamic Sharia law.