Seventy Christians were found bound and beheaded inside a church in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern Lubero Territory of North Kivu in mid-February.

Local sources attributed the attack to the Allied Democratic Forces, an Islamist rebel group. Militants reportedly rounded up the Christians and took them to the church in Kasanga, where they were decapitated by machete.

Most news agencies and Open Doors, an international Christian organization focused on religious persecution, referred to the church simply as Protestant.

In an email to the Baptist Standard Léon Lapamabila, a Baptist minister in Kinshasa, capital of the DRC, identified the church as affiliated with the Communauté Baptiste au Center de l’Afrique—the Community of Baptist Churches in Central Africa.

Lapamabila, the secretary general of the Baptist conventions in the DRC, the Communauté Baptiste des Fidèles en Afrique, reported those who were killed included women, children and the elderly.

Wissam al-Saliby, president of the 21Wilberforce human rights organization, noted the timing of the attack in Kasanga.

“Mid-February, we were commemorating the martyrdom of 21 Coptic Christian men who refused to convert, and as a result, were brutally beheaded on a Mediterranean beach by Islamist groups in Libya in February 2015. We are appalled that, during the same period, the Islamist group ADF committed a horrific massacre of more than 70 men and women in a Baptist church in Eastern Congo,” he said.

“Was this a deliberate message by Islamists to say that their evil is still present 10 years after the martyrdom of the 21 men? The transnational and persisting phenomena of such groups is a condemnation for a decade of the international community’s effort to suppress ISIS and its affiliated groups.”

M23 rebels occupy Goma and Bukavu

In addition to violence perpetrated by ADF militant jihadists, the M23 rebel paramilitary group recently seized control of Goma in North Kivu Province and Bukavu in South Kivu Province.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article was written by Ken Camp and originally published by The Baptist Standard.