by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) - Five female church members were abducted, and their pastor shot and wounded during a terrorist attack on their church in Nigeria’s Katsina state on Sunday, Morning Star News reports. The attack is just one more of tens of thousands of attacks, murders and abductions, maimings, and displacements of Christians by Islamic militants since 2015.
The January 15 attack was carried out by terrorists on motorcycles who stormed the New Life for All Church in Katsina state’s Dantsauri village during the Sunday worship service, MSN reports.
“A distress call was received that terrorists in their numbers, shooting sporadically, invaded Dantsauri village in Kankara,” Gambo Isah of the Katsina State Police Command said in a statement. “The terrorists shot one Pastor Haruna on his hand and kidnapped five women who were in a Sunday service in their church.”
Isah identified the five kidnapped females as Rabi Isiaku, 15; Nooseba Shuaibu, 13; Rabi Saidu, 36; Rabi Baba, 49; and Saratu Hadi, 27, MSN said.
Pastor Haruna was taken to General Hospital, Kankara for treatment.
The Open Doors international aid mission ranked Nigeria at number six on its World Watch List 2023 of the top 50 countries where Christians are persecuted. According to Open Doors, 5,014 Christians were murdered in Nigeria last year, and 4,726 were abducted. Nigeria was recently described by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom as a “killing field for Christians.”