Jihadist gunmen abduct dozens during Friday prayers in Nigeria's Niger State

On Friday afternoon in the village of Kpenya, in Niger State's Borgu Local Government Area, armed men descended on a mosque during prayers. They came in what witnesses described as the hundreds, carrying guns, knives, and machetes. When the worshippers finished their recitation, the gunmen surrounded the building and began taking people away. By the time the assault ended, as many as sixty people had been abducted.

The attack was not isolated. The armed group had already moved through several villages in the area before reaching the mosque, leaving a trail of violence in their wake. Abdullahi Mohammed Nasir, the chair of the Borgu area council, confirmed the abductions to the Associated Press in stark terms: people were taken while at prayer, surrounded and removed by force.

Witnesses who survived the assault described a scene of deliberate brutality. One person who was there told the AFP news agency that after the Friday prayers concluded, the gunmen launched their attack with systematic violence. They killed several people during the raid, the witness said, claiming as they did so that the worshippers were not following the true teachings of Islam. The specificity of this claim—the theological justification offered for the killings—suggested an ideological motivation behind the assault, not random banditry.

Yet the official accounting of what happened diverged sharply from what survivors witnessed. Police stated that according to their developing report, no one had been killed in the attack. This contradiction between witness testimony and police statements left the actual death toll unclear, though the evidence from those present suggested the toll was real and significant.

The identity of the attackers remained uncertain in the immediate aftermath. No group claimed responsibility on Saturday, and police had not identified the perpetrators. But witnesses offered competing theories. One told AFP that the gunmen belonged to Lakurawa, a group that researchers have linked to the Islamic State's Sahel Province affiliate. Another resident suggested the attackers were Ansaru, a splinter faction that broke away from Boko Haram years ago and now operates under al-Qaeda's umbrella. A third account introduced further complexity: witnesses said that Mahmuda, a rival jihadi group, had actually clashed with the attackers and helped some of the abducted people escape.

The possibility that multiple extremist factions were operating in the same area, sometimes in conflict with one another, reflected the fractured landscape of Nigeria's security crisis. The country's military and police forces, already stretched thin managing overlapping insurgencies across the north, now faced a situation where different jihadist groups competed for territory and recruits. Beyond the ideological extremists, Nigeria also contended with non-ideological criminal gangs—known locally as bandits—who conducted kidnappings and violence for profit rather than religious conviction.

The attack in Kpenya came at a moment when jihadi violence in Nigeria had declined from its peak during Boko Haram's most intense years of insurgency. Yet the decline in overall numbers masked a more complicated reality: the threat had not disappeared, it had fragmented. Multiple groups now operated across the same regions, sometimes cooperating, sometimes fighting each other, all while security forces struggled to contain them. The abduction of sixty worshippers during Friday prayers was a reminder that despite years of military operations, the capacity of these groups to strike at civilian populations remained intact.