By BosNewsLife Africa Service
ABUJA/LONDON (BosNewsLife)– Christians from all denominations will attend prayer services in Nigeria and Britain Friday, September 11, to remember last month’s Islamic attacks against especially Nigerian Christians in which over 1,000 people died, organizers of the gatherings said.
The services, which will take place at Abuja’s Ecumenical Center and at St Marylebone Anglican Church in London, are being coordinated by the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) and Nigerian clergymen in London, BosNewsLife learned Tuesday, September 8.
“As well as commemorating the victims of violence and expressing solidarity, both services will highlight” attacks by the militant group Boko Haram against the Christian community, said Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), an advocacy group involved in Friday’s events.
It said that, “Over 1000 people are thought to have died after Boko Haram launched a series of attacks in [the states of] Bauchi, Yobe, Kano and Borno of northern Nigeria last month.”
SECURITY FORCES
In the Borno State capital of Maiduguri, militants reportedly held a combined force of police and army units at bay for four days and seized numerous hostages, including several hundred Christians for “use as human shields at their besieged headquarters” CSW said.
It comes amid international concerns over rising Islamic extremism in the country and reports that a captured Boko fighter has admitted receiving weapons and explosives training in Afghanistan.
Reverend Canon Ben Enwuchola, the London event host, said in a statement that he was shocked about last month’s violence. “In 1987, I ferried victims of religious violence from the university in Kano to hospital. It is shocking that over twenty years later, Nigeria’s cyclical religious violence has neither been recognised nor adequately addressed.”
He urged Christians to pray for “lasting peace and reconciliation between the religious communities of northern and central Nigeria.” CSW National Director Stuart Windsor said it was crucial that “those who suffer will be given a voice and that there might be an end to the violence that has torn at the heart” of Africa’s most populous nation.
Nigeria’s 140 million population is divided between Christians in the south, and Muslims mainly in the north, where 12 of the 36 states adopted Islamic sharia law in 2000, adding to religious tensions.
This article is as crazy as they come. And depicts the very root cause of inter-religious strife in Nigeria. Firstly, the picture you have used is that taken after an oil pipeline explosion in Nigeria a few years back. And the Boko Haram incident was not ‘anti Christian’, but directed against the nation- especially those in authority led by a Muslim. You either ignore this obvious fact or in your usual paranoial abandone the cause of the truth. As people who are supposed to be ‘Christ-like’, I expect you to have more respect for the truth than you are showing and also to stop stoking the flame of enmity and strife.
Of the 1000 number you have given as the number of likely victims- more than 700 of these were members of Boko Haram themeselves- were these Christians too?
Dear Abdul,
We are not in the business of “stoking the flame of enmity an strife.” The figures were based on several reports received from rights groups and other sources. We do not know how many Christians are among the victims yet, but clearly many. You are right that Muslims were also killed in the violence.
BosNewsLife News Center
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