MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) – Gunmen killed five Nigerian police officers and two civilians during an attack in southeastern Imo state on Friday, a police spokesperson said, the latest incident in a state riven by gang and separatist violence.
Armed groups have attacked police stations and government and electoral offices in states in the southeast, which the government often blames on the banned separatist Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) group. IPOB denies the charges.
Imo police state spokesperson Henry Okoye confirmed the death of the officers and civilians but did not give details.
Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria, is prone to widespread insecurity, with gun attacks and kidnappings in the northwest, a festering Islamist insurgency in the northeast and separatist and gang violence in the southeast.
Separatist groups such as the IPOB campaign for southeastern Nigeria, homeland of the Igbo ethnic group, to be an independent country.
The region attempted to secede in 1967 under the name Republic of Biafra, triggering a three-year civil war in which more than a million people died, mostly of starvation.
(Reporting by Adewale Kolawole, writing by MacDonald Dzirutwe; editing by Barbara Lewis)
