ICC Note:
According to reports, 22 Christians were killed when a busy church service at Waga Chakawa village was attack Sunday, January 26. Attackers, reportedly linked to the Boko Haram sect, stormed the peaceful service armed with guns and explosives. After attacking the church, the suspected militants burned down houses and took local Christians hostage. This is only the latest attack perpetrated by Boko Haram against the Christian community of northern Nigeria. With the expressed aim of establishing a separate Islamic state in Nigeria’s north, Boko Haram has unleashed a campaign of terror and death on Christians living in northern Nigeria. Pray for the victims and their families.
1/27/2014 Nigeria (Reuters) – Attackers armed with guns and explosives killed 22 people at a busy church service in a northeast Nigerian village, witnesses said on Monday, in a region where Islamist sect Boko Haram is resisting a military crackdown.
They set off bombs and fired into the congregation in the Catholic church in Waga Chakawa village in Adamawa state on Sunday morning, before burning houses and taking residents hostage during a four-hour siege, witnesses said.
President Goodluck Jonathan is struggling to contain Boko Haram in remote rural regions in the country’s northeast corner, where the sect first launched an uprising in 2009.
The shady sect, which wants to impose sharia law on a country split roughly equally between Christians and Muslims, has killed thousands over the past four and a half years and is considered the biggest security risk in Africa’s top oil exporter and second largest economy after South Africa.
Its fighters’ favourite targets have traditionally been security forces, politicians who oppose them and Christian minorities in the largely Muslim north.
The spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Yola, Reverend Father Raymond Danbouye, confirmed 22 people killed in the attack were buried at a funeral on Monday.
The military and police did not respond to requests for comment but one army source confirmed the attack, asking not to be named because he wasn’t authorised to speak with the media.
…
[Full Story]