Nigeria

Christians in two states of Nigeria were mourning Wednesday, July 7, the killings of at least eight Christian believers, after Muslim militants reportedly attacked several villages.

Nigeria’s evangelical Church of Christ was mourning Tuesday, April 27, after Nigerian Muslims killed two journalists working for a church publication and two church members in the troubled Bauchi state.

Funerals were underway Friday, April 16, in a Muslim-dominated northern Nigerian state for a pentecostal pastor and his wife who were reportedly hacked to death and burnt to ashes by Muslim assailants.

A group of Muslim herdsmen disguised as soldiers “butchered” and then burned over a dozen Christians Wednesday, March 17, in a small Christian village in central Nigeria, near the location where hundreds were killed last week, witnesses and officials said.

A tense calm returned to the Nigerian city of Jos Saturday, January 30, after hundreds of people were killed in days of clashes between Muslims and Christians, missionaries said.

Some 500 suspects remained detained Thursday, December 11, for their alleged involvement in rioting sparked by Muslim attacks on Christians, that left at least six pastors dead and some 500 others killed.

At least some 400 people have been killed and thousands forced to flee their homes in the central Nigerian city of Jos where Christians and Muslims clashed in the worst sectarian violence in Africa’s most populous nation in years. Fighting began Friday, November 28, amid a dispute over the result of a local election, witnesses said Saturday, November 29.

A major umbrella group representing numerous Christian denominations in Nigeria urged authorities Tuesday, September 2, to detain those responsible for the burning of an evangelical church in Ilorin, the capital of this African nation’s Kwara State.

Blaming the death of their leader on Christian prayers, an Islamist group that launched a hate campaign in response to an evangelistic event in 2004 is reportedly attacking Christians in this Kwara state capital with renewed virulence, area Christians said.

Christians in two churches that were were extensively damaged last year during religious violence in northern Nigeria were without places of worship Sunday, August 3, after authorities reportedly ordered them to vacate their premises.

Christians in several areas of Nigeria’s Kano State remained anxious Tuesday, March 4, after a government-backed mob armed with machetes reportedly set fire to a church building, before looting and dismantling the property, while a bishop narrowly escaped death, rights watchers said.

A Muslim man’s failed attempt to marry a young Christian woman resulted in him accusing her of "blasphemy", triggering violence in the Nigerian town of Yana that left at least one person dead, seven Christians hospitalized and five churches destroyed, a Christian news agency reported Tuesday, February 11.