According to a report by Channels TV from 5:48, on Tuesday November 18, 2025, Pastor Mathew Ashimolowo, the Founder and Senior Pastor of Kingsway International Christian Centre (KICC), has pointed to the brutal killing of college student Deborah Samuel in Sokoto as a stark example of religiously motivated violence and persecution in Nigeria, questioning whether such acts amount to genocide.
Ashimolowo recounted the events leading up to the murder of Deborah Samuel, a student at Shehu Shagari College of Education, who was lynched by a mob in May 2022 over alleged blasphemy.
He detailed the simple comment that triggered the tragic sequence of events.
“Deborah Samuel, a girl in a poly technic in Nigeria in the north. She saw on the platform of our class that people were posting religious [content] and she said, ‘hey, this platform is for our study not for religion.’ They went, they killed her.”
The cleric argued that the subsequent legal proceedings, where a large number of lawyers showed up to defend the accused, further underscored the religious polarization surrounding the case.
“And when it became a court case, 52 barristers who hold the religious faith different from hers showed up to defend the guys who killed her.”
Ashimolowo concluded by using the incident to challenge the national conversation on religious freedom and targeted violence.
“Is that genocide or not?” he asked, implicitly linking the mob killing to a systematic effort to terrorize and suppress religious minorities. View, More,
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