Six gangsters and three police officers were killed in southern Nigeria when security forces tried to search a house ahead of a controversial census, police said today.
A gunbattle broke out in the southern Nigerian market town of Nnewi when police approached a house where a meeting of suspected Biafran separatists was underway late Monday night, according to police and press reports.
“We went there looking to find out why they were holding a meeting and they opened fire on us,” a senior Anambra State police officer told AFP in the nearby city of Onitsha, speaking on condition of anonimity.
“Three of our men were killed in the crossfire and six were killed on the other side. A lot of people were injured,” he told AFP.
The Anambra officer stressed that, while officers had approached the house expecting to find a separatist meeting, they had in fact encountered one of the armed gangs which control the region’s busy markets.
Security forces in Anambra are on high alert after attacks on census counters by members of the banned Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) which wants a state for ethnic Igbos.
MASSOB has urged southeast Nigeria’s estimated 40 million Igbo to boycott the Nigerian census in order to assert their “Biafran identity.”
Between 1967 and 1970 the then state of Biafra fought and lost a disastrous independence war against federal forces.