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18-05-2025
ABUJA/ MAIDUGURI: Gunmen killed dozens people in four separate attacks in central Nigeria’s Benue state, a Red Cross official said Sunday, the latest flare-up of unrest in the region.
The attacks happened Saturday night in four villages.
Clashes between nomadic cattle herders and farmers over land use are common in central Nigeria.
“Reports from the field have confirmed the killings of at least 23 people from different attacks,” Red Cross secretary in Benue state Anthony Abah told media.
Eight people were killed in Ukum, nine in nearby Logo, three each in Guma and Kwande, he said, citing data from the organization’s field disaster officers. Several others were wounded, he added.
A police spokeswoman said she was unaware of the attacks.
Cephas Kangeh, a retired general manager with a state electricity company who recently relocated to his home village near one of the affected areas told media he had heard of three killings, including a couple ambushed while riding a motorcycle which “was taken away by the herdsmen”.
Chinese operators are mining gold in the area, he said.
“The attacks did not take place near the mining sites,” said Kangeh.
“However, one is puzzled as to why indigenous people are always attacked, maimed… yet there has never been a single case of attack on the Chinese miners who are operating in these areas.”
Some of the latest attacks were staged in areas previously targeted by attacks slightly over a month ago, which left at least 56 dead.
With many herders belonging to the Muslim Fulani ethnic group, and many farmers Christian, the attacks in Nigeria’s so-called Middle Belt often take on a religious or ethnic dimension.
Two attacks by unidentified gunmen earlier in April in neighboring Plateau state left more than 100 people dead.
Across the wider Middle Belt, including in Benue, land used by farmers and herders is coming under stress from climate change and human expansion, sparking deadly competition for increasingly limited space.
However, owHoweverHwhen Nigerian Adamu Buba saw a woman in a torn hijab at his friend’s wedding last Saturday, he asked two colleagues to serve her food. Moments later, while taking photos of the bride and groom, he heard a loud blast that knocked him to the ground.
The woman in the hijab detonated explosives strapped on her back, killing herself and 10 others. Buba lay bleeding and disoriented.
“All I could see were dead bodies on the ground and body parts all around,” said the 34-year-old Buba from a hospital bed in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state in northeast Nigeria.
The bride and groom survived.
This was the first of four suspected suicide bombings in the past week by women that also targeted a funeral for victims, a hospital and a security checkpoint, which authorities say killed up to 32 people in Gwoza town in Borno, the heartland of an Islamist insurgency but Gwoza residents blamed Boko Haram and the military said this showed how far the group would go to inflict damage on civilians and security targets.
Residents saw the attacks as punishment for collaborating with security forces against the insurgents. They also said this could be a message to Boko Haram defectors in the town that they were not safe after leaving the group. (Int’l News Desk)
