A priest was burned to death and another was shot and wounded in an attack on a presbytery in Nigeria.
Fr Isaac Achi of Ss Peter and Paul Church in Kafin Koro, in Niger State, was murdered by assailants who set fire to his house in the early hours of Sunday morning.
Fr Collins Omeh, the assistant priest, was shot while trying to escape the building but survived his injuries and is being treated in hospital.
According to Diocese of Minna, the priest is “responding to treatment”.
Fr Amanchukwu Emeka, the chancellor of Minna Diocese, said: “Please pray for healing mercy from God for Collins.”
Some media reports have claimed that the gunmen doused the outside of the building with petrol and set fire to it after failing for more than an hour to break in.
Sources told Aid to the Church in Need, the Catholic charity for persecuted Christians, that they believed the attackers’ initial motive was to kidnap Fr Achi.
One said: “Because of the dimension and the duration of the assault, we can say that it was planned and organised.”
During the attack, Fr Achi managed to contact relatives, who alerted the police, but no-one attempted to rescue him during the attack. He had previously survived a bombing of 2011.
The attack took place the same day that Fr Michael Olofinlade of Ibadan Archdiocese in south Nigeria was kidnapped.
Last year a total of 28 priests were kidnapped in Nigeria and four were murdered. Aid to the Church in Need revealed in “Persecuted and Forgotten? A Report on Christians oppressed for their Faith 2020-22” that about 7,600 Christians were killed in the country between January 2021 and June 2022.
Speaking in November at the report launch, Bishop Jude Arogundade of Ondo, Nigeria, told the Houses of Parliament that the persecution of Christians in his country by Islamic militants is tantamount to a genocide.
He said: “I strongly appeal to this important body and all people of goodwill to compel the Nigerian government to stop the genocide.”
He urged UK politicians at the very least to “ask for help from other countries before Nigeria is overrun as is the case of Afghanistan”.
“The entire nation is on the edge, apprehensive of a major offensive that may sweep round the entire country,” he said.
The bishop had earlier emerged into the international limelight last summer when he publicly criticised Irish President Michael D. Higgins for blaming “climate change” for the massacre of 41 Catholics, including many children, by Islamists during a Mass at St Francis’ Church, Owo, a parish in his diocese.
President Higgins had suggested moral parity between the massacre “and any attempt to scapegoat pastoral peoples who are among the foremost victims of the consequences of climate change”.
Bishop Arogundade said, however, that “terror attacks, banditry, and unabated onslaught in Nigeria and in the Sahel Region and climate change have nothing in common”.
Any informed person could see “that alluding to some form of politics of climate change in our present situation is completely inappropriate”, the bishop continued.
“Terrorists are on free loose slaughtering, massacring, injuring, and installing terror in different parts of Nigeria since over eight years not because of any reasonable thing but because they are evil — period.”
The scale and frequency of attacks by jihadists means Nigeria is now rated as the seventh most dangerous country in the world for Christians, according to the Open Doors human rights group.
(Photograph of Fr Isaac Achi courtesy of Aid to the Church in Need)
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