Another Herdsmen Attack Claims 11 Lives in Benue

Herdsmen kill people in church.

The Benue State government on Wednesday said Eleven people have been killed in Makurdi after another attack, a day after at least 19 people died in an attack in a church that caused widespread outrage.

An adviser to the Benue governor Samuel Ortom on Islamic affairs, Rilwanu Adamu,  stated that the attack happened in the state capital, Makurdi, and targeted ethnic Hausa traders.

Adamu said that two mosque was destroyed while traders’ goods ransacked.

“We lost 11 of our people…. We have five people also hospitalised in Makurdi,” he said, warning that the death toll could yet rise.

The latest attack is coming a day after the Sunday attack on a church in the Mbalom community south of Makurdi on Tuesday, which left 16 worshippers and two Roman Catholic priests dead.

President Muhammadu Buhari described the attack, which locals blamed on nomadic herdsmen, as “evil and satanic” and said it was designed to whip up religious conflict.

The Police was forced to fire teargas to disperse the crowd protesting the killing of 19 person on Sunday.

Hundreds of people have been killed in tit-for-tat violence in Benue and other central states since the start of this year in an escalation of a decades-old dispute over land and water.