Violence in Nigeria continues, over 25 killed this week as Boko Haram claims responsibility
A group of Nigerian missionaries and Christian converts have managed to escape a battle field in northern Nigeria where some militants embraced Christianity, but elsewhere Christians faced Islamic attacks, a key mission leader told Worthy News.
The death toll from the latest gun battles between militants and police in northern Nigeria rose to 27 on Wednesday, police tells AFP.
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Gunmen attacked five police posts and a prison across three cities late Tuesday, sparking responses from security forces, with the heaviest fighting concentrated in Kano, Nigeria’s second city and the largest in the north.
No group claimed the raids, but the violence was likely to be blamed on Boko Haram Islamists, responsible for more than 1,000 deaths in Nigeria since mid-2009.
The militants launched gun and bomb attacks on Kano’s Dala, Panshekara and Challawa police posts late Tuesday, state police commissioner Ibrahim Idris told AFP. The Goron Dutse prison was also targeted.
“All these attacks were repelled,” he said. “A total of 17 extremists were killed by our men. We lost a police corporal.”
n a letter, shared by CAM with Worthy News, an unidentified Nigerian mission leader says that “a whole village in southern Kaduna is fighting” and that “five missionaries” are “there now whose work among local unreached Muslim tribes has been very successful.”
The missionaries arrived there to “comfort and shelter unprepared villagers who fled in terror as heavily armed Muslim militants invaded without warning. No police or soldiers have come, and it is doubtful they will.”
Boko Haram has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks on churches throughout northern Nigeria, which, unlike the south, is mainly Muslim. After the group’s attack on three churches in Kaduna during June 17’s Sunday mass, Christian youth rioted and attacked Muslims. Between the bombings and the retaliatory killings, at least 50 people died in all. The Nigerian government imposed a curfew on the entire state, which remains in effect.
Missionaries said as many as 400 people have died since Islamic group Boko Haram, or ‘Western Education is a Sin’, bombed three churches in cities Kaduna and Zaria, as well last week.
However, “There is still much good news” as elsewhere “all our Muslim converts” trapped since last week “are secure and protected now in our discipleship center,” the mission leader said. “The [village] chief wants us back when he knows it is safe.”
