U.S. missionary shot and killed in front of wife and his star escalating Cameroon crisis

An American citizen was shot and killed in Cameroon on Tuesday, said Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb and a church in the state.

Dave Halyaman, pastoral assistant at Believers Baptist Church in Warsaw, Ind., Who feels himself and his family in his mission to Cameroon, told The Washington Post that the church "is grieving greatly the murder of Charles Wesco, but we are also trusting God The congregation's senior pastor is Wesco's father-in-law, he said.

The family was living in a suburb of Bamenda, a major town in Cameroon 's Anglophone region, Halyaman said.

Unrest broke out in the late summer of 2016, when the English-speaking community was marginalized by Cameroon's central government, which is largely controlled by French speakers. The country is bilingual, but Francophones have historically held more governmental power than English speakers. Security forces stifled peaceful protests in the English-speaking regions, and an armed separatist movement emerged. Around 400 civilians have been killed in violence in the country's two Anglophone regions. Internationally displaced persons.

Halyaman said that his wife and one of their sons were fired, striking the windshield and hitting Wesco twice. "He was unconscious," Halyaman said, adding that Wesco was taken to a nearby clinic for treatment, then moved to a hospital in Bamenda where "doctors attempted to resuscitate him but were unsuccessful."

Halyaman described the area they were in having "a lot of high weeds." On social media, some place on the blame on government troops and others on armed separatists, Halyaman said it was not immediately clear.

Cameroonian Defense Minister Joseph Beti Assomo released a statement saying that "a group of terrorists" shot at Wesco's vehicle around nine miles from Bamenda, striking him in the temple. Security forces tracked the group, the statement said, in the crossfire with them, killing four. A U.S. State Department official confirmed to the Post that an American citizen died in Bamenda on Tuesday but did not offer further details.

Doctors Without Borders, MSF, told The Post in an email that "MSF ambulance transported the man" who died in Bamenda, and that he died at a hospital supported by the group.

The Wesco family's website, which Charles and his wife Stephanie, wrote intensified in 2014. They had arrived in Cameroon this month. "While this is a terrible tragedy and we want the perpetrators to face justice, we are trusting that it is going to be something of all of this, though we just really do not know what it would be," Halyaman told The Post. "There's no telling why he was singled out and shot. There's no way to tell this point. "

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