Bandits invade church, inflict injuries on priest, others

Some hoodlums on Sunday swooped on St. Peters Anglican Church, Aguleri in Anambra-East Local Government Area of Anambra State, inflicting injuries on a church teacher, the priest and the church gardener.

One of the injured, Christopher Chukwu, was said to have come out in the dead of the night to ease himself when he saw strange flashlights in the church premises and proceeded towards the direction.

A source said the hoodlums pounced on Chukwu, using machetes and other weapons on him.

“His cry for help attracted the resident priest, Rev. Akachukwu Ikedilo and the gardener, Mr. Mathew Nwude, who suffered the same fate in a bid to rescue the catechist from the marauders,” the source said.

However, Rev. Ikedilo, who narrated the ordeal to journalists said that it was the church teacher and the gardener, who encountered the hoodlums and that from what he was told, the miscreants cut him with an axe and that in a bid to escape, the hoodlums inflicted more injuries on him and the gardener.

“When I came down to ascertain what happened, the criminals had fled and left the church teacher and the gardener in a pool of their blood,” the priest said.

The President-General of Aguleri Community Assembly, Chief Barr. Hipo Onwuegbuke, who also narrated the sad event recalled that he got a distress call at about 3:45 am from one of their relatives.

He said, “I immediately alerted the police and local vigilantes, who stormed the church premises just in time but unfortunately the miscreants, had escaped through Umueri, a neighbouring community.

“The police and local vigilante operatives saw the ladder with which the hoodlums wanted to use to climb into the residence of the priest.”

Fears in the community, however, is that the hoodlums didn’t come to steal from the church, fueling the belief that they may have been attacked by a neighbouring community (name withheld) with whom Aguleri has had a history of war.

But the Anambra State Police command, speaking through its spokesperson, SP Haruna Mohammed dismissed the insinuation, saying that the invaders were on a mission to rob.

But Onwuegbuke, insisted that the horrible incident was more than just robbery, insisting that a similar incident had recently been foiled by local vigilance group.