Nigeria’s secret police say two of its men were killed Sunday by Biafran separatists who in turn claim 21 of their members were killed in an unprovoked attack on a peaceful meeting.
The Department of State Service (DSS) said one of its patrols was attacked Sunday in Emene, southwestern Enugu state, by members of the outlawed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).
“The Service lost two personnel in what was clearly an unprovoked violent attack launched by IPOB on the team,” it said in a statement.
Security forces were on the trail of the attackers, it said.
“All measures have been put in place to ensure that their killers and everyone involved in this dastardly act are promptly apprehended and brought to justice.”
IPOB spokesman Emma Powerful denied his group killed any government security forces and said instead that it was Nigerian forces who killed unarmed Biafrans holding a peaceful meeting in Emene.
“The Nigerian security personnel stormed IPOB meeting ground in Enugu and started shooting sporadically which consumed the lives of 21 members and 47 arrested for no just cause or provocation,” Powerful said in a statement.
“Those responsible for this barbaric killing in Enugu…must pay for their actions against IPOB at the appropriate time,” he said.
The DSS statement did not say it killed any Biafran separatists, nor could the figure of 21 dead be independently verified.
However, local and international human rights bodies have long accused Nigerian security forces of killing IPOB members.
In 2016, Amnesty International accused the national security forces of extra-judicial executions of 150 IPOB members, a charge they denied.
IPOB which seeks a separate state for the Igbo people of southeast Nigeria has frequently clashed with the security forces.
Calls for a separate state of Biafra are a sensitive subject in Nigeria, after a unilateral declaration of independence in 1967 sparked a brutal 30-month civil war.
More than one million people died, most of them Igbos, from the effects of conflict and disease.
