Blood on Palm Sunday: Nigeria’s Middle Belt Buries Its Dead Again, and Aso Rock Is Silent

Grace Mwantiri was still wearing the white gele she had tied for Palm Sunday service when the shooting started. She ran. She does not remember in which direction. When she found her way back to Gari Ya Waye community in Angwan Rukuba, Jos, the following morning, three of her neighbours were under tarpaulin sheets outside the compound where she had sat for three hours that morning singing hymns. Her husband was among those whose bodies had been carried to the mortuary.

It was the night of March 29, 2026. Palm Sunday. The holiest week of the Christian calendar. And armed men on motorcycles, reportedly dressed in military-style uniforms, had come to Angwan Rukuba at approximately 7:50 p.m. and opened fire on everything that moved.

By dawn, the argument over how many were dead had already begun. The Plateau State Police Command confirmed 14 deaths, including 10 men and two women killed on the spot, with two more bodies recovered from nearby bushes on Monday morning. Community leaders told Vanguard that no fewer than 27 people were feared dead, with 14 killed on the spot and 13 others dying later in hospital. International Christian Concern, a humanitarian advocacy group with sources on the ground, reported the toll at at least 30. The governor of Plateau State imposed a 48-hour curfew over Jos North and visited the community in an armored tank.

The dead are still being counted. The killers have not been found.

A Calendar of Blood: Six Years of Easter Attacks

What happened in Angwan Rukuba on March 29, 2026 was not random. It was the latest installment in a pattern so consistent, so clockwork in its timing, that it can now be mapped on a calendar with the same accuracy as the liturgical seasons it targets.

In 2020, nine people, including children and a pregnant woman, were killed in Hura-Maiyanga in Bassa LGA of Plateau State during Holy Week.

In 2021 and 2022, attacks during Easter weekend resulted in the destruction of homes and the displacement of communities across Plateau.

In 2024, four people were killed in Njukkudel and Tangur in Bokkos LGA on Easter Monday.

In 2025, the worst single Easter-period attack in recent memory: at around midnight on Palm Sunday, at least 54 Christians were killed in Zikke village near Jos, with over 100 households destroyed and more than 2,000 people displaced. Fifteen of the dead were children.

In 2026, the cycle has repeated itself at Angwan Rukuba.

Since January 2025, at least 120 Christians have been killed in Plateau State alone, according to data compiled by International Christian Concern. The Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa has documented over 55,910 deaths across 9,970 deadly attacks in Nigeria between October 2019 and September 2023. According to Open Doors, 82 percent of the 4,998 Christians killed for faith-related reasons globally in 2023 occurred in Nigeria. The US State Department reports that 4,118 Christians were killed, 3,300 abducted, and 100,000 internally displaced in Nigeria between October 2022 and September 2023 alone.

These are not statistics from a conflict zone in the accepted military sense. These are statistics from communities where people go to church on Sunday mornings, plant crops, teach school, and attend bachelor’s parties. Which is precisely what the 13 people killed in Kahir village, Kagarko LGA, Kaduna State were doing on the same Palm Sunday night; attending a bachelor’s party when armed men opened fire on the gathering. Authorities in Kaduna identified victims in the Kahir, Kadda, and Kukyer communities, ranging in age from 21 to 31 years.

The Middle Belt buried its young men and its worshippers on the same Sunday.

Who Came, and Who Did Nothing

Eyewitness accounts of the Angwan Rukuba attack describe assailants arriving in large numbers on motorcycles, opening fire near a popular market junction and a Plateau Private School, then retreating toward nearby mountainous areas. One resident, Nyam Isaac, told reporters the attackers came around 8 p.m. and “shot randomly at people” in what he described as “a market setting.” A separate account described attackers in soldier khaki; the same eyewitness detail that appeared after the 2025 Palm Sunday killings in Zikke village.

The Nigerian Army arrived at approximately 8:45 p.m., approximately 55 minutes after the shooting started, according to the Catholic Archdiocese of Jos.

Security personnel, including the Nigerian Army, reportedly arrived at around 8:45 p.m. to restore order and secure the affected community, long after the killers had vanished into the hills.

Residents of Angwan Rukuba were still on the streets on Monday morning, blocking roads, chanting, and demanding answers. One protester captured it clearly: “People are outside because of the attack that happened yesterday. They chased the security men because they are not doing any help right here. Yesterday around 7pm to 8pm in the night, there was no light, so these people firing; straight shooting on rapid; a lot of people had to flee for their lives.”

Plateau Governor Caleb Manasseh Mutfwang visited in an armored tank, condemned the attack as “barbaric and unprovoked,” and announced that the government would pay the medical bills of the injured. “I stood with grieving families, listened to their pain, and shared in their loss,” he said. “No words can truly capture the depth of sorrow in moments like this.” The governor announced a 48-hour curfew effective from midnight on March 29 through April 1. His office announced that security agencies were pursuing those responsible. As of press time, no arrest had been announced.

The Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, issued a statement from its national secretariat condemning the attack in what it called “the strongest possible terms.” CAN stated that “Palm Sunday is meant to be a day of peace, hope, and reflection, but instead it became a day of bloodshed.” The organisation described the assailants as “armed men, reportedly in significant numbers, who moved into a civilian community disguised in uniforms resembling those of security forces and opened fire on defenceless people.” CAN concluded with words that carry the accumulated weight of six consecutive Easter seasons of bloodshed: “Nigeria cannot keep bleeding like this.”

From the federal government in Abuja, silence.

President Tinubu had not issued a statement on the Angwan Rukuba killings or the Kahir bachelor’s party massacre as of press time. American humanitarian worker Alex Barbir, speaking in a video recorded at the scene in Jos, directed his outrage at the President personally: “Tinubu, where are you? As your people are slaughtered in the night, as you sit in Aso Rock and you do absolutely nothing, you allow your people to be killed again and again and again and again. When will it stop? When will you hear the cries of Nigerians, of Christians? You can no longer deny genocide.”

WATCH VIDEO

The video went viral within hours. The debate it ignited, whether what is happening in Nigeria’s Middle Belt constitutes genocide, has been ongoing at the international level for years. In October 2025, United States President Donald Trump re-designated Nigeria as a Country of Particular Concern over continued killing of Christians, reinstating a classification the Biden administration had controversially removed in 2021. The Nigerian government has consistently denied that a genocide against Christians is occurring.

Social media reactions to Barbir’s video captured the raw exhaustion of Nigerians who have watched this pattern repeat without consequence. “The government in Nigeria has failed over and over again in protecting the lives and property of Nigerians,” wrote one commenter cited by Daily Post. Another wrote, “Pray for the people of Jos. The killing of innocent souls has increased. Of the truth, it’s hard to preach peace when there’s no justice.”

The Pattern Nobody Is Prosecuting

The most damning fact about the Palm Sunday 2026 killings is not the body count. The most damning fact is that this has happened before; with the same timing, the same method, the same motorcycles, the same disappearance into mountain terrain, and the same absence of prosecution.

Security analysts who have studied the Plateau State pattern note that communities have been raising the alarm about the predictability of these attacks for years. Garus Abednago, a Plateau-based conflict researcher, has argued that “these attacks are strategic, designed to intimidate and prepare the ground for broader territorial control.” Dr. Walid Abdullahi, an expert in African security studies, has stated that “militant groups view Plateau State as critical to their expansionist agenda” because “whoever controls Plateau can influence surrounding states.”

The federal government deployed Operation Savannah Shield to Kwara State in February 2026 after 162 people were killed in Muslim-majority Woro village. The speed and scale of that federal response drew immediate comparison to the far slower and less decisive reaction to recurring attacks on Christian communities in Plateau and Kaduna.

Barr. Dalyop Solomon Mwantiri, President of the Berom Youth Moulders Association, told Vanguard after the Palm Sunday killings, “This is another sad episode in the recurring security challenges facing communities in the state.” The phrase “another sad episode” carries a weight that no press statement from Abuja has ever matched. It is the language of a community that has stopped expecting a different result.

What Grace Mwantiri Is Wearing This Holy Week

Grace Mwantiri has folded the white gele and put it at the bottom of a plastic bag. She does not know when she will wear it again. She is attending the burial of her husband this week, during the same Holy Week in which she buried her neighbour’s child last year, and her cousin the year before.

She does not know the names of the men who came on motorcycles. She does not know if they have been arrested. She does not know if they will be arrested. What she knows is that when she goes to church on Easter Sunday, she will sit in the same pew where she sat on Palm Sunday, in the same community where men died outside the gate, and she will sing the same hymns she has always sung.

“We will not leave,” she says. “This is our land. Our grandparents are buried here.”

The men on motorcycles came on Palm Sunday. Nigeria’s government has not yet explained why they were allowed to come, why they were not stopped, and why no one has yet paid any price for what they did.

Easter is four days away. The same calendar that tells the Church when to celebrate the resurrection also, in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, now tells armed groups when to strike. Until someone in authority takes that pattern seriously, the churches will keep filling on Holy Week, and the mortuaries will keep filling after.