A prominent, theologically outspoken Islamic cleric in northern Nigeria has been killed in a targeted shooting outside his residence in Dutsin-Ma, Katsina State, according to official police statements and eyewitness accounts shared with the BBC. 47-year-old Yahaya Masussuka was bidding farewell to visiting guests on Monday evening when two unidentified assailants pulled up to the scene on a motorcycle and opened fire, striking both the preacher and one of his guests. Emergency responders rushed both wounded individuals to a local medical facility, but attending medical staff confirmed that neither survived their injuries. As of press time, investigators have not publicly identified a clear motive for the killing, though Masussuka was known to have received repeated death threats via social media platforms in the months leading up to his death, where he regularly shared recorded religious content challenging widely accepted tenets of mainstream Islamic teaching. The cleric’s public theological positions deviated from common orthodox interpretations rooted in the Hadith, the canonical collection of the Prophet Muhammad’s documented sayings and actions that serves as a core interpretive framework alongside the Quran. A widely held belief across most Muslim communities holds that after burial, every deceased person’s soul is interrogated by two angels in the grave, with righteous believers granted peaceful rest until the Day of Judgment and those found wanting facing immediate torment. Masussuka, who centered his teachings exclusively on text from the Quran and questioned the veracity of select Hadith accounts, openly rejected this doctrine of post-burial in-grave interrogation. His unorthodox views once landed him a nine-month prison sentence, after he publicly mocked revered local Islamic scholars for their adherence to the contested Hadith-derived teachings. Masussuka’s religious journey began at the age of 13, when he started delivering sermons at local Quranic schools before pursuing advanced theological studies at Egypt’s prestigious Al-Azhar University and completing additional academic training in Oman. Back in Nigeria, he operated a private in-home recording studio to film his teaching videos, which he distributed widely across social media to reach his large base of followers. Beyond his theological stances, the cleric was a vocal, high-profile critic of violent religious extremism and radicalization, and consistently advocated for constructive interfaith dialogue and peaceful coexistence between Nigeria’s Muslim and Christian populations, who represent nearly equal shares of the country’s total population. Nigeria has seen tens of thousands of people from both religious communities lose their lives in cycles of ethnic and religious communal violence over the past 25 years, a crisis that Masussuka worked actively to de-escalate. In recognition of his peacebuilding efforts, Nigeria’s Network for Good Governance and Transparency awarded Masussuka a Peace Ambassador Award last year. His murder marks the seventh killing of a prominent Muslim preacher in northern Nigeria over the past 20 years; six of the previous targeted killings were carried out by Boko Haram, the jihadist insurgent group that launched its armed campaign in 2009 from Nigeria’s northeast. Boko Haram’s stated agenda rejects Western education and secular governance, with the explicit goal of establishing a strict Islamic state across the region. Additional reporting for this story was contributed by BBC Pidgin, and further coverage of developments across the African continent is available via BBCAfrica.com, as well as the BBC Africa social media channels on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and the network’s dedicated Africa podcast series.