At least six people, including four police officers, were killed in an attack by armed individuals in Ebonyi State, southeast Nigeria, as reported by the Nigerian police in a statement on Saturday.
Joshua Okando, the spokesperson for the state police, indicated that the attack occurred around 5 a.m. at a police checkpoint on the Nwezenyi road on the outskirts of Abakaliki city.
Okando detailed that the security forces engaged in a fierce gun battle with the assailants, resulting in the death of four security personnel and two civilians caught in the crossfire.
The attackers, who remain at large according to Okando, are believed to be members of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a group fighting for the establishment of a separate state for the Igbo ethnic group, along with its armed wing, the Eastern Security Network.
Attacks in southeast Nigeria are often attributed to the IPOB, which consistently denies involvement in such acts.
The issue of separatism is a sensitive topic in Nigeria, where the declaration of the independent Republic of Biafra by Igbo army officers in 1967 sparked a three-year civil war, resulting in over a million deaths.
The armed violence in the country's southeast, which is experiencing ongoing separatist unrest stemming from the Biafran War, poses one of the security challenges facing Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
The armed forces are also combating groups of armed bandits in the northwestern and central states, in addition to a 14-year-old terrorist insurgency in the northeast.
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