More than 50 Christians have died this year at the hands of Muslim herdsmen in Nigeria.
The current death toll of Christians in the state of Adamawa in northeastern Nigeria rings is currently at 54 people, the Morning Star News reported.
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Christian Bachama tribesmen have formed in the state in respond to the violence posted by terror group Boko Haram and Muslim Fulani herdsmen.
On May 2, about 400 Fulani herdsmen attacked multiple villages, killing more than a dozen people, officials said.
Other attacks occurred on Feb. 27, Jan. 21 and Jan. 3.
“They invaded our community at about 2 a.m., burning down houses and destroying farmlands,” one villager said of the January siege.
The president of the Lutheran World Fellowship and archbishop of the Lutheran Church of Christ in Nigeria, the Rev. Musa Panti Filibus, said the killings have undermined the role of the church.
“It is most saddening that the senseless killings and attacks on our people continues unabated,” he said last month. “We are disturbed by the monstrous acts of our attackers and killers, who raid, ransack, and set ablaze our villages and towns sometimes in broad daylight.”
Filibus is urging Christians in the area to not stop praying for the herdsmen.
“I call us to continue to put pressure on our government at all levels to rise to their responsibility of protecting citizens from internal and external aggression,” he said. “We will continue to condemn in strongest terms possible the brutal and gruesome killings of innocent citizens.”
To make matters worse, a Muslim judge in Yola, the capital of Adamawa state, sentenced five Christians to death after they killed a herdsman that had joined the attakcs on Christians.
No Muslim Fulani herdsmen have been prosecuted in the killings.
The Rev. Samson Ayokunle, the president of the Christian Association of Nigeria, said in a statement that there is no moral justification for the death sentences of the Christians.
“CAN is not supporting jungle justice or any criminality,” he said. “…The international community watched in anguish how government security agencies could not bring perpetrators of these heinous killings to book.”
Nigeria ranks 14th on the Open Doors’ 2018 World Watch List of countries where Christians suffer the most prosecution.
Christians make up more than 50 percent of Nigeria’s population.
(H/T: Morning Star News)