(Barnabas Fund) — Barnabas Fund contacts report that eleven church buildings were destroyed in the course of a three-day attack in Gaoua district, south-west Burkina Faso, that began on Friday, 18 April.
The perpetrators, from the Gan ethnic group, wreaked havoc in the town of Loropeni, where Christians are a small minority, as they burnt out and caused severe structural damage to the churches.
The attacks are thought to be in revenge for the police arrest of eight Gan locals, including a tribal chief, for their desecration of a Christian grave on April 9. The group had attempted to exhume a recently deceased local ethnic Gan woman, wife of a church deacon, in order to impose a “traditional funeral ceremony” (i.e. a non-Christian funeral).
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