FACT-CHECK: Old Photo of 2020 Boko Haram Attack Falsely Shared as September 2025 Christian Massacre in Nigeria

BY: Mustapha Lawal 

Claim: 

A Twitter user posted a picture on September 28, 2025, with the caption: “Yesterday, 64 Christians were slaughtered in Nigeria, and the world remains deafeningly silent. Murdered for their faith; no political agenda, no warring nations, just pure religious hatred. Yes…genocide is on the horizon at the hands of Islamic jihadists.”

Verdict: 

Misleading. The attached picture is not from a recent attack. It dates back to a jihadist assault on farmers in northeast Nigeria in 2020. 

Background

The claim taps into a growing fear that Nigeria may be facing what some describe as a slow-motion genocide against Christians. Reports of mass killings in the country, especially in the Middle Belt and northern regions, have often been linked to religious identity, herder-farmer clashes, or jihadist violence. Several Christian organisations, human rights groups, and foreign commentators have raised alarm about attacks on churches, clergy, and communities.

However, while the reality of sectarian-targeted violence exists, especially in the context of attacks by extremist groups like Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), evidence of a coordinated genocide has not been established. Still, such narratives spread rapidly online, often accompanied by recycled or misattributed images meant to provoke outrage and panic.

Several incidents have long fueled fears of a looming “Christian genocide” in Nigeria. The narrative has been amplified recently by foreign commentators such as US television host Bill Maher, who claimed that Christians in Nigeria are being “systematically exterminated.” On his show Real Time in late September 2025, Maher alleged that Islamists have killed more than 100,000 Christians and destroyed 18,000 churches since 2009, claims that were built on fabricated numbers and unverified images.

As noted in a recent opinion piece by Gimba Kakanda, such claims oversimplify Nigeria’s security crises and distort the truth. Nigeria’s violence is not reducible to a Muslim-versus-Christian war. The conflicts are multi-layered, driven by terrorism, criminality, farmer–herder clashes over land and water, and political grievances. Boko Haram and ISWAP have certainly attacked churches and Christian communities, but they have also massacred Muslims, in fact, the majority of their victims have been Muslim clerics, village leaders, and ordinary civilians they branded apostates. Resource-based clashes in Nigeria’s Middle Belt, for example, are often framed as religious because Fulani herders are predominantly Muslim and many of the farmers are Christian. Yet at their root, these confrontations are over grazing land, climate stress, and dwindling resources. Both Christians and Muslims have been victims and perpetrators.

This broader context shows why framing Nigeria’s violence as “purely religious hatred” is misleading. While Christians have undeniably suffered horrific losses, so have Muslims. Presenting the violence as one-sided not only distorts reality but also risks inflaming tensions between faith communities.

Misrepresenting Nigeria’s security crisis as a one-sided religious genocide fuels dangerous propaganda. It inflames divisions between Christians and Muslims, undermines peacebuilding efforts, and distracts from the real drivers of violence such as terrorism, resource conflicts, and governance failures. Spreading recycled images as if they depict new atrocities risks deepening mistrust at a time when nuanced understanding and solidarity are most urgently needed.

The Twitter claim in question alleged that 64 Christians were slaughtered “yesterday,” but offered no evidence beyond a photograph. Given the sensitivity of religious violence in Nigeria, FactCheckAfrica conducted verification to confirm the authenticity and timing of the photo.

Verification

To test the claim, FactCheckAfrica conducted a Google reverse image search of the picture shared in the viral tweet, as well as keyword searches such as “farmers killed Nigeria 2020 Maiduguri” and “110 farmers Boko Haram attack.” 

The results confirmed that the image dates back to late November 2020 and was used in international media reports about the Koshobe massacre. Outlets such as France24 and HumAngle Media published the image in connection with the beheading of farmers by suspected jihadists in Borno State. Further searches found no credible evidence of a massacre of 64 Christians in Nigeria on or around September 28, 2025, as claimed in the tweet. Neither Nigerian media nor international outlets reported such an incident. 

According to a report by TheCable on the incident, Nigerians and the rest of the world woke up on a Sunday morning in late November 2020 to the sad news of a gruesome massacre of fellow Nigerians by suspected Islamic terrorists. According to the United Nations, in the early afternoon of 28 November 2020, suspected militants attacked men and women harvesting crops in Koshobe village and other rural communities in Jere Local Government Area, near Maiduguri, Borno State. Reports indicated that at least 43 people were beheaded during the attack, while others were abducted and many remained unaccounted for. Initially, the UN reported that as many as 110 people had been killed in the raid but later clarified that the actual toll was uncertain. Edward Kallon, then the UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Nigeria, described the massacre as “the most violent direct attack against innocent civilians this year.”

Conclusion:

The viral claim that 64 Christians were killed in Nigeria “yesterday”, posted on September 28, 2025, is misleading. The image used is from a 2020 jihadist attack on farmers in Koshobe, Borno State, not a recent event. While Christians in Nigeria do face targeted attacks, claims of a systematic genocide misrepresent the country’s complex crises and erase the fact that Muslims have also been major victims of terrorist violence.