Shot on His Way to Church:  A Nigerian Killed Every 86 Minutes

But Catholic News TV Gets Straight Story from Equipping the Persecuted

By Mike Odeh James

(Kaduna) The Baptist pastor was on his way to church on Sunday morning, September 20, when gunmen shot him dead.

His secretary was killed with him in Maraban Kantoma, near Dorowa Babuje village in Barkin Ladi County, Plateau State. His son was critically wounded, residents said.

Baptist pastor Samuel Nandi was shot and killed by suspected Muslim Fulani militants while on his way to a church service in central Nigeria’s Plateau State, one of at least nine people killed in a series of attacks. He died early Sunday after being ambushed.  

The pastor will not appear in the newest count of Nigeria’s Christian dead. He was killed 12 days after it closed.

That count, compiled by Equipping the Persecuted (ETP), a U.S.-based nonprofit based in Sioux City, Iowa, records 4,216 Christians killed between January 1 and September 8, 2026. That is 16.8 deaths a day, or one every 86 minutes.

ETP calls the figure a floor, not a ceiling. It builds the count from field reports, eyewitness and survivor testimony and local contacts, and a death enters its master registry only after names, incidents and supporting evidence are reconciled. The group also estimates more than 5 million Christians displaced and more than 600 Christian communities destroyed or emptied. Those are ETP’s figures, not national statistics compiled by the UN.  

A Weekend in Barkin Ladi

The pastor was one of at least eight Christians killed in Barkin Ladi County that weekend. On the evening of September 19, militants ambushed and killed five Christians in Gana-Ropp village. 

In neighboring Benue State, eight Christians were reported killed in Ayilamo, Logo County, on September 10.

None of those deaths are in the 4,216. Each came after the count closed.

The World Starts Listening — EWTN

The report moved from field data to Washington and New York in one week.

EWTN News Nightly (Eternal World Television Network, a Catholic broadcaster) — a daily news and analysis program from Washington, DC — aired it on Wednesday, September 23, 2026 with the headline: “New Report: 1 Christian Is Killed Every 86 Minutes in Nigeria, on Average.”  

As EWTN’s put it: According to a new report from “Equipping the Persecuted,” more than 4,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria between January 1 and September 8 of this year. On average, one Christian is killed approximately every 86 minutes. Judd Saul, founder of “Equipping the Persecuted,” joins to share what is happening on the ground in Nigeria and what he believes the United Nations is failing to understand as the U.N. General Assembly meets.  

Saul is a family man, award-winning documentary filmmaker, entrepreneur, and missionary who embarked on a call to action in Nigeria in 2011. Since then, ministering to Nigerians has been a part of Judd’s life, and he continues to visit 3-4 times a year.  

On EWTN and in his Washington release that week, his message has been identical:

“America cannot continue to issue statements of concern while Christians are being slaughtered and entire communities are erased,” said Judd Saul, founder of Equipping the Persecuted.  

“The Nigerian government is not only failing to protect its Christian citizens, but it is also covering up the scale of the atrocities and allowing terror groups to thrive in plain sight,”  Saul says. 

And as for Root Cause:

“The driving force behind the mass killings in Nigeria is radical Islamification — a coordinated effort to seize Christian land and erase Christian communities,”  according to Saul.  

ETP’s Nigeria Terror Tracker finds that Fulani-linked armed networks account for more documented deaths than Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) combined.

The perpetrators are armed networks –  not an ethnic group, not an abstraction. Millions of Fulani Nigerians are herders, traders and civil servants with no link to the violence. ETP’s argument is that Abuja and Washington keep misnaming the killers, and a misnamed enemy draws the wrong response.

“Farmer-herder clashes” remains the label most often pinned on Middle Belt killings. ETP calls it incomplete. Land and grazing disputes are real, the report acknowledges. But a pastor gunned down on his way to a Sunday service is not a quarrel over crops.

Washington’s Blind Spot

U.S. military cooperation with Nigeria has concentrated on ISIS-linked groups in the Northeast. ETP says that covers only part of the threat. Most of the documented deaths fall in the Middle Belt — Benue, Plateau, southern Kaduna, Nasarawa and Taraba — a region that sits low on both Nigerian and U.S. security priorities.

In its September 18 release, ETP said Washington must target militant financiers, weapons suppliers and logistics networks. It must build procedures that turn credible warnings into action. And Nigeria must be kept on the U.S. list of Countries of Particular Concern until there is measurable progress on civilian protection, prosecutions, safe returns and release of captives.

Warnings Before the Bullets

The registry counts the dead. The alerts are meant to keep that count down.

ETP says its network, including TruthNigeria, has issued more than 200 operational terror alerts, with an accuracy rate of 93 percent. Those figures are the organization’s own and have not been independently audited. The alerts now go out through a smartphone app, alongside reporting and the Terror Tracker map.

A warning buys villagers minutes, sometimes hours, to run. ETP says an alert issued that weekend helped avert a wider massacre. Yet, in Barkin Ladi, it was not enough to save a pastor already on the road to his church.

Mike Odeh James is a conflict reporter for TruthNigeria.

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