The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) of Nigeria confirmed 22 dead and fifty wounded in last Sunday’s attack on a Catholic church in the southwest of the country, thus lowering the number of deaths that the Nigerian Catholic Lay Council had estimated at more than 50 this Monday.
“We can confirm that 22 people were killed and 50 wounded in the attack on Saint Francis Catholic Church, in the town of Owo,” Olanrenwaju Kadiri, the head of NEMA operations in Ondo state (where Owo is located), told EFE.
The wounded are receiving medical treatments in the hospital and some of them are in critical condition, Kadiri added.
Unidentified gunmen, disguised as members of the congregation, fired shots and used explosives in the attack on the church, according to police.
“The gunmen, from the preliminary investigationsThey invaded the church with weapons and materials suspected of being explosives.“, Police spokesman Olumuyiwa Adejobi explained in a statement.
“Police investigators who were part of the first responders on the scene recovered spent AK-47 ammunition casings, while the Explosive Devices-Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Explosives (EOD-CBRNE) confirmed the use of explosivesAdejobi added.
According to local media, a large part of the victims were children and women. The new casualty figures were released a day after the national president of the Nigerian Council of Lay Catholics, Henry Yunkwap, assured in a statement that there were more than fifty deaths in the attack, although the authorities had not openly disclosed a specific number of deaths and injuries.
Yunkwap condemned the incident as a “barbaric act” carried out by “animals in human form”. Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari and Ondo Governor Oluwarotimi Odunayo Akeredolu also condemned the massacre.
“No matter what happens, this country will never give in to evil people, and darkness will never defeat light. Nigeria will eventually win.”Buhari noted. Likewise, Pope Francis lamented the attack on Monday and prayed for the “conversion of those who are blinded by hatred and violence,” as announced by the Vatican.
The high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, joined the messages of rejection of the bloody attack, describing it as a “despicable” act. The attack It took place after at least 31 people died on May 28 in a stampede. occurred at an event organized by a church in the city of Port Harcourt, in southern Nigeria.
Nigeria suffers from incessant bandit attacks and mass kidnappings for lucrative ransoms, but these tend to take place in the center and north-west of the country, making the church massacre in the south-west unusual. to this insecurity the jihadist threat that plagues the northeast of the country since 2009 is addedcaused by the Boko Haram group and, since 2015, by its ISWAP (Islamic State in West Africa Province) faction.