Suspected ISIS-linked extremists beheaded a pastor, handed his severed head to his wife, and forced her to carry the head to the police station in the southern African country of Mozambique, according to a report from The Christian Post.
The jihadist militants decapitated the pastor, a resident of Nova Zambezia area in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, last Wednesday, the U.S.-based persecution watchdog International Christian Concern said.
Zimbabwe Daily also reported on the murder, saying the pastor’s wife told police that “suspected Islamic State-linked insurgents intercepted the pastor in a field, decapitated him and then handed over his head to her and ordered her to inform the authorities.”
Earlier this month, the U.K.-based watchdog organization Human Rights Watch reported that an armed group in Cabo Delgado province called Al Sunnah wa Jama’ah, also known as Al-Shabab, had forced kidnapped women and girls to “marry” their fighters.
According to the Daily Mail, The woman, a resident of Nova Zambezia, told officials that the attackers kidnapped her husband from the farm before beheading him. Speaking on Thursday, Mozambique’s President Filipe Nyusi Thursday stressed that his country had witnessed fewer jihadist attacks this year than last after Rwanda and neighboring countries helped tackle the four-year insurgency.
The Cabo Delgado province has been rocked by attacks by Islamic State-linked militants since 2017, killing at least 3,340 people and displacing more than 800,000. In one attack earlier this year, dozens of innocent people were killed when Islamist insurgents launched a raid on the northern town of Palma on March 24, including Briton Philip Mawer. But since July, more than 3,100 African, European and US soldiers have been deployed to the northern province to quell the unrest.
