Recounting a devastating insurgent assault, Pastor Adesoji Dada Aderemi has detailed the horrifying moment terrorists opened fire on his Kwara State congregation, leaving nine worshippers dead inside the church and forcing surviving villagers to sleep on tree-tops to escape the slaughter.
In a deeply harrowing testimony of survival, Pastor Adesoji Dada Aderemi of the Divine Evangelical Mission Church has broken his silence to recount the terrifying moment armed terrorists stormed his parish in the Woro community of Kwara State. Speaking with SaharaReporters nearly four months after the tragic incident, the visibly traumatized Christian cleric described how a routine evening service was violently hijacked, turning the quiet agrarian settlement into what he could only liken to a live-action horror film. The brutal assault shattered the small congregation, leaving trailing lines of corpses scattered across the village and forcing hundreds of displaced survivors into a state of permanent exile.
The calculated ambush struck at the very heart of the community’s spiritual routine, catching the local residents entirely off guard during a period of vulnerability. Pastor Aderemi recalled that the congregation had just settled into their weekly evening Bible study program when the heavily armed assailants surrounded the church perimeter and opened fire directly into the sanctuary. Reflecting on the initial moments of the chaos, the emotional cleric stated, “The 3rd of February, 2026 would remain tortuous to me for a long time because we had just begun our weekly Bible studies when the terrorists arrived between 6:30pm and 7:00pm,” adding, “The next thing was that gunshots rented the air. What followed was chaos as I watched in confusion to see some members of my congregation fall to the bullets, then blood flowing everywhere.”
As the heavy gunfire tore through the building, panicking worshippers desperately smashed through church windows to escape the immediate kill zone, running blindly into the surrounding dense forest reserves as the attackers set the church structure ablaze. To evade the rampaging gunmen who maintained a steady stream of gunfire until the early hours of the morning, the pastor and several other fleeing villagers resorted to climbing and sleeping on tree-tops through the freezing night. “Those of us who escaped through the windows could not fathom what was going on. It was a typical horror film scene,” the cleric recounted, noting that by daybreak, the full scale of the massacre became clear as nine bullet-riddled corpses were recovered from inside the charred ruins of the church alone, while dozens of other bodies littered the village pathways—a devastating loss that has left the community completely deserted due to lingering fears of a secondary strike.
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