Spraying bullets and detonating explosives, masked gunmen burst into a Sunday mass in Nigeria and massacred dozens of worshippers in one of the country’s latest incidents of religious violence.
The June 5 killings occurred at the St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in the town of Owo in Nigeria’s southwestern Ondo state during a Pentecost service celebrating the seventh Sunday after Easter when Christians believe the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples of Jesus after his ascension.
The death toll is uncertain, but media reports and a doctor at a local hospital said at least 50 people, including women and children, were killed in the attack.
The killings sent shockwaves throughout Nigeria’s Christian community. Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari condemned the attack as “heinous.” In a statement issued by the Vatican, Pope Francis said he “prays for the victims and the country, painfully affected at a time of celebration.”
It wasn’t immediately clear who carried out the killings, and no group claimed responsibility. Nigeria has been battling a long-running insurgency by radical Islamists in the country’s northeast, while armed gangs engage in attacks and kidnappings for ransom mostly in the northwest.
Fierce clashes over increasingly scarce farmland also regularly erupt between mostly Christian farming communities and Muslim herders who have lived with each other in relative harmony for centuries.
Such vicious attacks are rare, however, in the southwest. In fact, Ondo, some 300 miles from Nigeria’s commercial capital Lagos, is known as one of the country’s most peaceful states. The massacre in the church highlights not just the spreading violence in the country but suggests that its security forces are struggling to control it, The Wall Street Journal noted in an article.
On May 29, gunmen abducted the prelate of Nigeria’s Methodist Church, Samuel Kanu, along with two other pastors, on a highway in the southeastern state of Abia. The three clerics were freed the following day, and Kanu told a news conference that the church had paid $240,000 for their release.
The kidnappings occurred at a time when legislators in Nigeria are on the verge of making it unlawful to pay ransoms, with the crime being punishable by up to 15 years imprisonment. The legislation also seeks the death sentence for kidnappers.
On May 12 in the most northwestern state of Sokoto, a mob of Muslim college students beat to death Deborah Samuel, a young Christian woman, and then burned her body after accusing her of blaspheming against Islam.
Open Doors, a Christian support group that prepares an annual ranking of the world’s top 50 countries most hostile to Christians, has placed Nigeria seventh on its list for 2022. In just the first three months of 2022, the group found, 896 civilians in Nigeria perished in attacks by Islamist militants.
“Not all were motivated by religious persecution, but a significant number of those men, women and children were murdered because they follow Jesus,” the organization said.
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