The school has been closed down since the incident. Principal Mallam Mohammed Saddique, who was injured in the melee, could not be reached for comment, but Vice-Principal Hajiya Hadiza Ali Gombe told Compass that the situation had been brought under control.

“There is no more problem,” she said, declining to speak further on the issue.

All secondary schools in the Gombe metropolitan area have been shut down indefinitely to avert a spread of the crisis, according to news reports.

Authorities have arrested at least 12 students involved in the killing, according to Voice of America. A five-member committee appointed by the state to investigate the incident is due to present findings in two weeks.

In February 2006 in the neighboring state of Bauchi, at least 20 Christians were killed and two churches were burned down by Muslims furious that a Christian high school teacher had tried to confiscate a Quran from a student who was reading it during class. (See Compass Direct News, “Teacher Accused of Blasphemy in Nigeria Disappears,” March 28, 2006).

Church in Mourning 
Asked whether there had been any past misunderstandings between Oluwasesin and her Muslim colleagues or students, Musa said there had been no underlying motives for killing her.

“She has never had any problem with any Muslim, whether a teacher or a student, in the three years she was in this school,” he said.

The killing of Oluwasesin shocked the Christian community in Gombe and has left her church devastated. At Evangel Chapel’s morning worship service on Sunday (March 25), Elder Robert Simon said during a sermon that such trials “are the real tests for our Christian faith, and our desire to follow Jesus lies in such difficult times.”

With the church’s regular preaching pastor traveling with the Oluwasesin family to her hometown of Abeokuta for burial, Simon said he understood how congregants were feeling.

“There are times you even don’t find God meaningful to you – you even ask questions like, ‘Where was God when this happened?’” he said. “God cannot be found anywhere else, because he is always there for us. It is Satan who makes God not to be meaningful to us, so that we go looking elsewhere for alternatives to God.”

Simon said Oluwasesin was working to “undo the kingdom of darkness,” as she was fighting  corruption in the educational system. “That is why we suffer persecution,” he said. “If Satan knows that you have been planted to undo his work, he will kill you. Oluwasesin did not live her life for the world but as an agent of the kingdom, working for righteousness. That is the reason she was killed.”

Andrew Osakue, also an elder at Evangel Chapel, told Compass, “she was like a flash in the pot. She came to this church barely four years ago. She was a touching example as to how a Christian should be.”

Oluwasesin was a Sunday school teacher and a member of her church’s prayer team. She and her husband had gone to Gombe on a one-year mandatory National Youth Service Scheme of the Nigerian government. After the service year, in which both of them excelled, they were employed by the Gombe state government, she as a teacher and he as a laboratory technician at a hospital in town.

Oluwasesin was the mother of two children.  

Copyright 2007 Compass Direct News