Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: GUNMEN have attacked a church in Nigeria, killing at least two people and kidnapping the pastor and some worshippers, police and witnesses said on November 19, days after 25 girls were abducted from a boarding school.
The attack in Eruku, a town in central Nigeria’s Kwara state, puts more pressure on the government, which is under scrutiny from the U.S. President Donald Trump who has threatened military action over what he says is persecution of Christians.
President Bola Tinubu postponed a planned trip to South Africa and Angola for G20 and AU-EU summits to receive security briefings on the two attacks, and ordered more security to hunt down the assailants in Kwara, his office said.
The president also directed the security agencies “to do everything possible” to rescue the schoolgirls, “abducted by the bandits and bring the girls back home safe”, his spokesperson Bayo Onanuga said. Rapper Nicki Minaj, the Trinidad-born artist, who lives in New York, speaking at the U.S. mission to the United Nations, said that in Nigeria “Christians are being targeted, driven from their homes and killed”.
Nigeria is grappling with an Islamist insurgency in the northeast, abductions and killings by armed gangs mainly in the northwest and deadly clashes between mainly Muslim herdsmen and mostly Christian farmers in its central belt.
The government says the U.S. designation of Nigeria as “a country of particular concern” misrepresents its complex security challenges and does not take into account its efforts to safeguard freedom of religion for all. In the latest attack, police responded to gunfire at around 6 p.m. on Tuesday and discovered one person fatally shot inside the church and another in a nearby bush.
