ABUJA (Reuters) - Gunmen killed 16 people when they fired on worshippers at a church in Nigeria's central Kogi state during a Monday evening service, police said on Tuesday.
"A group of three unidentified gunmen stormed the Deeper Life Church in Okene and opened fire on them, killing 16," Simeon Ille, spokesman for the Kogi state police, told Reuters by phone.
Ille said security forces last month prevented a suspected suicide bomber
from detonating an explosive at a different church in Okene, a town
around 140 miles south of the capital Abuja. The suspected would-be
bomber fled, he said.
Islamist sect Boko Haram has attacked several churches this year in Nigeria but Monday's attack was further south than the group's usual targets.
The group's strikes
are increasingly spreading across Nigeria, Africa's biggest oil
producer. Cities across the north and in the capital Abuja have been hit
in recent months by suicide bombers, never seen before last year in
Nigeria.
The country's 2
million barrel per day crude oil export business in the southern coastal
region has not been affected by the sect's violence.
The sect has killed hundreds this year in its insurgency against President Goodluck Jonathan's
government. It wants to have an Islamic state inside Nigeria, a country
of more than 160 million split roughly equally between Christians and
Muslims.
The group, which is
loosely based on Afghanistan's Taliban, usually target authority
figures and places of worship to settle scores with people they say
harmed their members.
(Reporting by Joe Brock and Garba Muhammed; Editing by Roger Atwood)
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