President Bola Tinubu said he was suspending his departure in light of the abductions and a separate church attack in which gunmen killed two people, spokesperson Bayo Onanuga said in a statement.

Both Christians and Muslims have been slaughtered in Nigeria, where there is terrorist activity over economic questions, Pope Leo XIV said Tuesday.

Nnamdi Kanu has been convicted for comments made in 2015 that the court said were a call to arms. The Biafra secession movement goes back to Nigeria's post-independence and a deadly civil war in the 1960s.