Two Christians Killed, 18 Kidnapped in Kaduna Raid

Around 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday 4 November 2026, armed attackers laid siege to Akwando village in Kachia Local Government Area, southern Kaduna State, Nigeria, killing two Christians and abducting around 18 people. The dead were named as Irimiya Galadima, 41, and Benjamin Danlami, 31, both married men.

The hostages are mostly women and children from one extended Christian family, the family of Reuben Buhari, co-founder of the Resilience Aid Dialogue Initiative (RADi). Fifteen of the abducted are female and three are male, including infants aged from four months to one year. One familly, one night, and a village left counting who is gone.

Akwando Village Attack: Two Killed, 18 Abducted in Kaduna

The raid was reported by CathoNews and TruthNigeria on 5 November, and the details they carried were precise and grim. The attackers came in the dark, struck a single village, and took almost an entire extended family. The two men who were killed, Galadima and Danlami, were married men, and their deaths have left two families without husbands and fathers.

Reports on the number abducted vary slightly. RADi, CathoNews and TruthNigeria put the figure at 18, while NewsUnplug reported 20 abducted, including a church choirmaster. This article uses the figure of 18 given by RADi, the organisation closest to the affected family, while noting that other reports differ.

Akwando is not a stranger to this kind of attack. On 26 April 2026, nine schoolchildren were kidnapped on their way to school in the same village, and they were freed only after 36 days. The village has now been hit twice in a single year, and the people who live there are asking how many more times it will happen before anyone stops it. Christians in Nigeria have faced repeated attacks on villages and farms, as reported in Christian Farmer Ezechi Ekenechukwu Killed in Enugu Raid.

Fulani Militia Accused of Targeting Male Christians in Kaduna

Southern thought leaders accuse the Fulani Ethnic Militia of a deliberate pattern: the selective killing of male Christians to seize their land. They point to the kidnapping at Ariko on 5 April 2026, when 17 of 37 worshippers died in captivity and only eight returned, all of them women and children. No male worshipper came back alive.

That pattern, if it is a pattern, is what makes the Akwando raid so frightening to the people of southern Kaduna. The men are killed or kept. The women and children are taken. The land is left empty, and the community that held it is broken apart. It is a strategy, not a random act of violence, and the people living through it can see the shape of it clearly.

The Nigerian police have given no public response to the 4 November raid. That silence is itself part of the story, because it is the silence the villagers have heard before. When the schoolchildren were taken in April, the village waited 36 days. When the worshippers were taken at Ariko, 17 of them never came home. The pattern of attacks in the region has been documented for months, as reported in Bishop Anagbe: Nigeria Lacks Will to End Benue Attacks.

Kaduna Christians Face Land Seizure and Selective Killings

The hostages taken from Akwando include infants of four months and one year old. Think about that for a moment. A baby of four months, taken from its home in the middle of the night, along with its mother and its aunts and its cousins. The attackers did not distinguish between the old and the young. They took the family whole.

For Reuben Buhari's family, the wait has now begun. They do not know where their loved ones are, what condition they are in, or what the attackers want. Ransom demands may come, or they may not. In the Ariko case, most of the captives died. In the Akwando schoolchildren case, all nine eventually came home. The family is caught between those two precedents, and every hour that passes without news makes the waiting harder.

The wider picture is one of a Christian community in southern Kaduna that feels abandoned. The churches are still open, the villages are still inhabited, but the people who live there know that the next raid could come any night. They sleep with one ear open, and they bury their dead with a grief that has become familiar. International attention has grown, as covered in Christian Solidarity International Launches Under Siege Campaign for Nigeria Christians, but attention is not protection.

What Happens Next for the Akwando Hostages

The immediate hope is that the 18 hostages are returned alive, as the nine schoolchildren were in April. The immediate fear is that they will share the fate of the Ariko worshippers, most of whom never came home. Between those two outcomes lies a negotiation, a ransom, or a rescue that nobody can yet see.

For the village of Akwando, the question is whether anyone in authority will act before the next attack. The police have said nothing. The government has said nothing. The families are left to organise their own response, to pray, to wait, and to hope that this time the story ends differently.

And for the rest of the world, the question is simpler and harder: how many more villages like Akwando will have to be named in headlines before the killing stops? The names of the dead are known. The names of the missing are known. What is not known is whether anyone will answer for them.

But the most surprising part of this story is yet to come — keep reading.