Ouagadougou, Dec 2, 2019: At least 14 people have been killed after gunmen opened fire inside a church in Burkina Faso.
The victims were attending a service on December 1 at a church in Hantoukoura, in the eastern part of the country.
The identity of the gunmen is not known and the motive is unclear.
Hundreds of people have been killed in the country over the past few years, mostly by jihadist groups, sparking ethnic and religious tensions especially on the border with Mali.
A statement from the regional government said that many people are injured.
A security source told AFP news agency that armed individuals carried out the attack, “executing the faithful including the pastor and children”.
Last October, 15 people were killed and two seriously injured in an attack on a mosque.
Jihadist attacks have increased in Burkina Faso since 2015, forcing thousands of schools to close down.
The conflict spread across the border from neighboring Mali where Islamist militants took over the north of the country in 2012 before French troops pushed them out.
The number of deaths there is on track to increase 60 percent this year, compared with the toll of 1,112 in 2018, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in Washington.
Roughly 500,000 people have been forced from their homes amid the unrest, the United Nations estimates.
“People fleeing the violence report attacks on their villages by extremists who often forcibly recruit male residents at gunpoint, killing those who resist,” Babar Baloch, a spokesman for the United Nations’ refugee agency, told reporters in Geneva last month. “Militants also stole cattle and other possessions.”
The Burkinabe army is working with French soldiers and forces from neighboring countries to beat back the insurgency, which began after the Libyan government collapsed in 2011 and triggered a violent chain reaction in West Africa.
Armed mercenaries once hired by Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi returned home to Mali and forged an alliance with extremists, which set off a conflict that has spilled over the border into Burkina Faso.
The church ambush in Hantoukoura follows attacks on places of worship that have killed dozens this year in the country’s borderlands.
Militants summarily executed a Catholic priest in eastern Bittou in February and stormed a Protestant church service two months later in northern Silgadji, killing five.
They torched another church in the area in May and attacked a separate procession the next day, killing a total of nine. They ambushed a Sunday mass in the north two weeks later, killing four.
The gunfire is often indiscriminate, analysts say, but extremists have targeted men for wearing crosses and Muslim leaders who do not follow their rules.
Some see the church attacks as a strategy to stoke religious tensions in a country where Muslim and Christian children play together in the street.
“They are planting seeds of a religious conflict,” Chrysogone Zougmore, president of the Burkinabe Movement for Human and Peoples’ Rights, a victim advocacy group in the country’s capital, Ouagadougou, told The Washington Post in August. “They want to create hate. They want to create differences between us.”