It was a night of heavy rainfall in Yelwata, a town in central Nigeria. On Friday June 13, over 500 Christians—many of them women and children—gathered together in temporary shelters in the town’s Market Square. Most of them had fled their homes across the region, hoping to find greater protection in Yelwata from a spate of recent attacks in which Islamist terrorists have massacred Christians.
Earlier in the day, the town’s armed vigilantes and a few policemen had set off to investigate reports of terrorist activity nearby. But this turned out to be a diversion, according to Steven Kefas, a Nigerian journalist.
At around 10:30 p.m., he told me, a “killer squad” of Islamists descended on the town in a three-hour murderous rampage.
