At least six people were killed, including four police officers, on Friday by armed men in Ebonyi state in southeastern Nigeria, police said in a statement on Saturday.
The attack took place around 5 a.m. at the Nwofe road police checkpoint on the outskirts of Abakaliki town, said Joshua Ukandu, a state police spokesman.
According to Joshua Ukandu,
“security forces engaged in a violent gun duel with thugs”
and
“four of the officers paid with their lives, while two civilians were caught in the crossfire and you are"
.
The attackers
“still at large”
are suspected of being
“members of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) Movement”
, which campaigns for a separate state for the Igbo ethnic group with its armed wing, the Eastern Security Network (ESN).
Attacks in the South-East are often attributed to IPOB, which systematically denies its involvement in this violence.
Separatism is a sensitive subject in Nigeria, where the declaration of an independent Republic of Biafra by Igbo army officers in 1967 sparked a three-year civil war causing more than a million deaths.
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Armed violence in the country's southeast, plagued by separatist unrest inherited from the Biafra War, is one of the security challenges facing Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, as the armed forces battle groups armed bandits in the north-western and central states and a fourteen-year-old jihadist insurgency in the North-East.