Church deacon hacked to death in Nigeria; daughter says killers murdered her 'like a chicken'

The grieving eldest daughter of the murdered deaconess in Nigeria said perpetrators killed her mother "like a chicken" and just left her for dead.

"Everybody is just saying it is well, nobody can understand how I feel," 15-year-old Jessica Olawale told Vanguard about her mother's brutal killing. She added, "She is innocent; she didn't do anybody any harm. She uses just her megaphone and Bible, just preaching. They just killed her like a chicken and left her there."

The eldest daughter cried uncontrollably over the untimely and brutal death of her mother, Deaconess Eunice Olawale of the Redeemed Christian Church of God in Old NEPA Road, Phase 4, Kubwa. The murder took place on the early morning of Saturday, July 9 when the deaconess went out for her "Morning Cry" preaching around Gbazango and Pipeline area of Kubwa, a satellite town in Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.

Olawale Elisha, Eunice's husband and also a pastor at the church, said his wife usually went out with a megaphone for her morning evangelism at 5 a.m. and returned home at 6 a.m. He said his two sons, who were out playing football then, told him at around 6:30 a.m. Saturday that they had overheard footballers talking about how hoodlums had killed a female preacher with a megaphone and even cut off her head and legs.

"I told my children that it couldn't be their mother, but they insisted we should go there and check, I put on my clothes and went there when we got there, we didn't see anybody, they had even covered her blood with sand," Sahara Reporters quoted Elisha as telling the journalists.

The bereaved family broke down when they saw the deaconess' dead body at the back of a pickup van at Phase 4 Police Station, Kubwa where the victim's body was taken.

Elisha maintained her wife didn't have enemies but recalled an incident when her wife told him that some people at the mosque had "made comments about her preaching." The suspected miscreants already fled the area.

John James, their second son, also recalled when he and his mom had almost died from illness days after her mother told off a Muslim cleric who went to their house for food.

Police claimed the victim's body remained intact with no parts cut off and that they already arrested at least six people for the murder amid a continuing investigation.