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Nigeria: Gunmen attack church, kill woman and her daughter

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – Suspected Islamic extremist gunmen stormed a church during Sunday service in Nigeria’s Kogi state earlier this month, killing a woman and her young daughter who were in attendance, the Christian Post reports.

The October 16 attack happened at the Celestial Church in Kogi state’s Lokoja area, some 65 miles from the Nigerian capital city of Abuja, CP reports. Several congregants were injured in the attack.

“When they entered, they started shooting at everyone outside the church,” a witness told the Nigerian Guardian newspaper. “I went and hid inside a cassava farm,” the witness added, comparing the incident to “an action film.”

Confirming the attack, and the killings, in a statement to the Associated Press, Jerry Omodara, Kogi state’s top security official, said it appeared the church had been targeted, but he did not say anything about how the perpetrators might be. “It looked like it was organized against that particular church because their altar was burned with petrol they went with,” Omodara told the AP.

Senior police officer SP William Ovye-Aya added: “There was a distress call made to our command over the attack, which left two female worshipers dead, and several others injured. On getting the alert, our command quickly deployed a response team to the area with a view to restoring normalcy in the area and arresting the perpetrators.” No suspect had been arrested as of a week after the attack.

Nigeria ranked number one in the world last year for the number of Christians (4,650) murdered by Islamic extremists.