Nigeria police said on Monday they are investigating no less than 15 murders over the past week in a rural farming community that was attacked by nomadic herdsmen.
Residents of four villages in the state of Nasarawa said they are “under siege” by the herders, who were reportedly enraged when one of their number was killed with a machete early last week.
Central Nigeria is the scene of a long-running conflict between the herders, who mostly hail from a nomadic Muslim tribe called the Fulani, and farmers, who are largely Christian. Christian groups were stunned last year when the Biden administration began insisting there was no strong religious dimension to the violence, and the Biden State Department removed Nigeria from its list of countries that severely violate religious freedom.
Ramhan Nansel, a spokesman for the Nasarawa state police, told Voice of America News (VOA) on Monday that the inciting incident in the current herder-farmer clash was the alleged killing of an 18-year-old herdsman who was struck in the head with a machete last week. Machetes are very common implements of both agriculture and murder in central Nigeria.
Nansel said the official count of reprisal killings stands at 15, although the villagers claim at least 38 people have been murdered, including a church pastor. Nigeria’s Vanguard reported on Monday that the Nasarawa state government supervised a mass burial for 38 victims over the weekend, most of them women and children.
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