YENAGOA, Nigeria (Reuters) – More than 1,800 prisoners are fleeing southeastern Nigeria after escaping when heavily armed gunmen attacked their prison with explosives and rocket-propelled grenades, authorities said.
Nigerian police said they believed a banned separatist group, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), was behind the attack on the city of Owerri, but a spokesman for the group denied their involvement.
The secessionist movement in the southeast is one of the serious security challenges facing President Muhammadu Buhari, including a ten-year Islamist insurgency in the northeast, a series of school kidnappings in the northwest, and piracy in the Gulf of Guinea.
Buhari said the attack, in a city close to the oil-rich Niger Delta region, which is the mainstay of Africa’s largest oil exporter and Africa’s largest economy, was a ” act of terrorism “. He ordered the security forces to arrest the fleeing prisoners.
The attackers stormed the facility at around 9.30am (0115 GMT) on Monday, the Nigeria Correctional Service reported.
“The Owerri Custody Center in Imo State has been attacked by unknown gunmen and has forcibly released a total of 1,844 detained inmates,” his spokesman said in a statement Monday afternoon. .
Police said the attackers used explosives to blow up the prison’s administrative block and entered the prison yard.
“Preliminary investigations have revealed that the attackers … are members of the Biafra Forbidden Indigenous People (IPOB),” said Frank Mba, a spokesman for the Nigerian Police.
IPOB wants the independence of a region in southeastern Nigeria called Biafra. One million people died in a 1967-70 civil war between the Nigerian government and secessionists there.
Security in the region has deteriorated in recent months. Several police stations have been attacked since January, with thefts of large quantities of ammunition and reports from the paramilitary wing of the IPOB, the Eastern Security Network (ESN), facing the military.
But an IPOB spokesman told Reuters the group did not carry out the raid on the prison.
“IPOB and ESN did not participate in the attack in Owerri, Imo state. It is not our mandate to attack security personnel or prison facilities, ”the IPOB spokesman said in a phone call.
Reports of Tife Owolabi to Yenagoa and Anamesere Igboeroteonwu to Onitsha; Additional reports from Camillus Eboh in Abuja; Writing by Tom Hogue and Alexis Akwagyiram; Edited by Raissa Kasolowsky