By George Conger, Anglican Ink.
Nigeria’s Holy Week was marked by bloodshed, with coordinated attacks on churches and Christian communities across Nigeria’s Middle Belt leaving more than 50 dead from Palm Sunday through Easter. As graphic accounts emerged from Kaduna, Benue, Nasarawa and Plateau states, worshippers faced one of the most violent Holy Weeks in recent years, raising urgent questions about security and the government’s ability to protect Christian communities.
International Christian Concern reports that “dozens” were killed in coordinated Easter weekend attacks in Benue, Kaduna and Nasarawa, just days after a Palm Sunday massacre in Jos, Plateau State, that left at least 30 dead. In Ungwan Rukuba, a Christian-majority area of Jos North, gunmen opened fire on residents on Palm Sunday evening, prompting a 48‑hour curfew as authorities struggled to contain one of the region’s worst attacks in years.
On Easter Sunday unidentified armed men attacked worshippers in multiple communities across the Middle Belt, often arriving on motorcycles and on foot and operating for extended periods before security forces arrived.
Yet amid the mounting death toll and distress among Nigerian Christians, the Primate of the Church of Nigeria, Archbishop Henry Ndukuba—one of global Anglicanism’s most prominent conservative leaders—offered only a general Easter homily on the welfare of citizens, without a specific public response to the massacres in his own country.
The most widely reported Easter attack occurred in Ariko, Kachia Local Government Area of Kaduna State, where gunmen stormed two churches during Easter Sunday worship. According to International Christian Concern and Catholic sources, the attackers first hit a congregation of the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) and then moved on to St Augustine’s Catholic Church nearby.