(Lagos) The attack by armed men on Sunday on a Catholic church during mass left at least 21 dead and around 40 injured, including children, in southwestern Nigeria, causing fear in the country the most populous in Africa.
Posted at 2:47 p.m.
It occurred during the Pentecost celebration at St. Francis Catholic Church in Owo town, Ondo state, usually untouched by jihadists and criminal gangs active in other parts of the country. country.
Monday morning, huge bloodstains still smeared the tiled floor of the church, its walls and wooden benches, testifying to the violence of this massacre. Human remains still litter the ground.
Photo Sunday Alamba, Associated Press
Personal effects were left on a bench during the attack.
According to the first investigations of the police, armed men invaded the church at the end of the morning with weapons and probably explosives.
Investigators then found Kalashnikov bullets and fragments of improvised explosive devices (IED) at the scene of the massacre, according to a police statement posted Monday evening on Twitter.
Three unexploded improvised explosive devices were also found.
“Disguised as worshipers”
“Some of the gunmen had disguised themselves as worshipers,” police said, adding that other assailants had positioned themselves around the church firing at the building from different directions.
About 40 injured people are currently being treated in several medical centers in the city. The Vice President of Nigeria arrived early afternoon in Owo to visit them.
Photo Sunday Alamba, Associated Press
An injured woman is treated at Saint-Louis Hospital, Owo.
To the relatives of the victims, he assured that those responsible for the killing “will be found, that they will pay for the consequences of this atrocious crime”.
Witnesses and survivors of the massacre told AFP of the panic that gripped the faithful when an explosion occurred in the church, followed by gunfire.
“I ran to the church and saw my two children and we brought them here to the federal medical center,” Nzeadu Paulinus said from the hospital where his 8- and 12-year-olds are receiving treatment. .
“Here, I saw so many people who were injured, and the dead,” he adds.
Photo TEMILADE ADELAJA, REUTERS
This attack, denounced the old as a “heinous murder of the faithful” by President Muhammadu Buhari, has not been claimed. Local authorities said security forces had been mobilized to find the attackers, whose identity is not known.
After a first condemnation Sunday evening, Pope Francis reacted again Monday evening saying he was “deeply saddened” by this “horrible attack”, in a telegram addressed to the Bishop of Ondo.
Generalized insecurity
The attack came two days before the launch by the APC, the ruling party, of its primaries for the presidential election of 2023 to choose its candidate.
President Buhari, a former army general, is ending his second term under fire as the country faces widespread insecurity.
“This brutal attack shows a total disregard for the right to life”, denounced on Twitter the NGO Amnesty International in Nigeria.
“Nigeria has a duty to protect the right to life of its people in all circumstances,” the NGO charged.
Attacks on religious sites are particularly sensitive in Nigeria, where tensions often escalate between communities in a country with a predominantly Christian south-east and a predominantly Muslim north.
However, this type of attack is rare in the relatively peaceful south-west of the country, even though criminal groups occasionally carry out kidnappings there.
Sunday’s massacre thus aroused fear in Nigeria, messages of support for the victims poured in, especially on social networks.
On Twitter, for example, Nigerian music superstar Burna Boy offered Monday morning “his sincere condolences to all those who have lost friends or loved ones in terrorist acts in recent months across the country”.
“So nothing is sacred anymore?” Mothers, fathers, children and babies are being killed,” he tweeted.
The Nigerian army faces numerous hotbeds of insecurity in the rest of the country. A jihadist insurgency has been raging for 12 years in the Northeast, which has left more than 40,000 dead and 2 million displaced. Gangs of looters and kidnappers terrorize the Northwest and Center, and the Southeast is the scene of separatist movements.