At Least Scores Of Christians Killed In Nigeria (Worthy News In-Depth)
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
ABUJA (Worthy News) – Suspected Islamic gunmen have killed more than 100 people, most of them women and children, in troubled north-central Nigeria over the last few days, and attacks continue, a well-informed Christian source told Worthy News on Thursday.
The violence against the mainly Christian community, confirmed by several authorities, broke out this week and reportedly spread to dozens of villages in Nigeria’s Plateau state. Separately two U.S. embassy staff members were killed in Nigeria, officials said.
Nigerian evangelist and farmer Paul Jongas, who knows the area well, told Worthy News that “many Christians have been killed, and several churches were burned since late Sunday night.”
He said as many as 24 villages were targeted in the ongoing attacks in Plateau’s Mangu Local Government Area (LGA), 60 kilometers (37 miles) from Jos, the state capital.
Regional police said seven suspects had been arrested in a “situation of sporadic shooting across a vast area of different villages.”
Residents blamed armed herdsmen from the Islamic Fulani tribe for the latest massacres.
Authorities say they took up arms over limited access to land and water, but Jongas suggested the mainly Christian farmers and other villagers were targeted for their faith.
SECURITY CONCERNS
Legislator Solomon Bulus Maren, who represents the area in Nigeria’s parliament, urged the country’s president to improve security immediately and stop the killings.
“I find it expedient at this time to intimate the world on the unfortunate happenings in my constituency, Mangu/Bokkos Federal Constituency, Plateau state, “ he told President
Muhammadu Buhari in a statement.
“In the last two days, over 100 persons, most of them women and children, have been massacred and butchered in cold blood by terrorists during an overnight unprovoked attack,” he said.
Besides the reported torching of churches, Maren noted that residents had “their houses burnt down, including foodstuffs, food barns, and seedlings.”
Yet on Thursday, several families in Plateau’s Mangu LGA could still not retrieve the victims’ bodies in volatile regions, said Philip Pamshak, who assisted with the mass burials. “The place is still bad, so we had to run,” he told the media.
Legislator Maren stressed that the massacres are among many in his constituency, where he said over 200 persons were killed in the last four months before May.
One of the earlier serious incidents happened after the March elections when more than 60 Christians were killed in the Mangu LGA district. The violence targeting Christians broke out when Caleb Manasseh Mutfwang was elected as Plateau’s next governor, Christians said.
ETHNIC CLEANSING
Mufwang has called the attacks against the Christian community “ethnic cleansing.”
Plateau state also saw 11 days of attacks in the second half of April when Fulani herdsmen killed at least 18 people and wounded others in predominantly Christian villages in Nigeria, sources said.
The herdsmen attacked 11 communities in Jos South, Riyom, Barkin-Ladi, Mangu, and Bokkos counties, according to local Christians and human rights watchers.
More than 50,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria by Islamic groups, including Fulani herdsmen and others, within two decades, according to several rights groups and researchers.
The Nigeria-based International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety) said last month that at least 52,250 people were killed over the past 14 years in Nigeria “only for being Christians.”
The anti-Christian violence forced millions to flee, the group said in its report “Martyred Christians in Nigeria.”
While more than 50 million Christians, mainly in Northern Nigeria, face “serious jihadist threats for being professed Christians,” no fewer than “14 million have been uprooted and 8 million forced to flee their homes to avoid being hacked to death,” the report explained.
US STAFF KILLED
About “5 million have been displaced and forced into Internally Displaced Peoples’ (IDP) camps within Nigeria and refugee camps at regional and sub-regional borders.”
Elsewhere, two staff members of the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria were shot and killed along with two police operatives traveling in a convoy, and three others were kidnapped, police in the volatile West Africa nation said Tuesday.
The group was on a humanitarian mission when they were attacked in the Ogbaru Local Government Area of the country’s Anambra State, one of the epicenters of Islamic separatist violence in the region, said Tochukwu Ikenga, a police spokesman in Anambra.
He confirmed that no U.S. citizen was part of the trip.
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