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At least eight suspected bandits have been killed by an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) believed to have been planted for security forces along Lukope Road in Shiroro Local Government Area of Niger State.
A counter-insurgency and security expert in the Lake Chad region, Zagazola Makama, made this known in a post on X on Saturday.
Makama said that the incident occurred at about 8:30 p.m. on March 20 along the Kurebe–Kushaka axis, a known corridor for armed groups operating within the forest belt.
He noted that the IED, suspected to have been emplaced by the bandits to target advancing troops, detonated when members of the group inadvertently rode over it while moving on motorcycles.
“The explosion occurred as the bandits were transiting the route, leading to the instant death of about eight of them and the injury of several others,” the source said.
According to the source, the bandits were believed to be loyalists of notorious bandit leader Dogo Gide and were reportedly heading towards the Lukope area.
It added that troops of Operation Fansan Yamma, Sector 1, were said to have responded swiftly to the scene and intensified patrols to forestall any further security breaches.
The incident has, however, heightened tension among residents of Kushaka, Kurebe, Gbato, and neighbouring communities over fears of possible reprisal attacks.
Meanwhile, stakeholders have alerted relevant authorities to take proactive measures to reassure residents and strengthen security presence in the area.
In other news, Nigeria’s former army chief deflected responsibility Friday for the government’s long-running failure to publicly name the financiers of terrorism in the country, saying the relevant agencies know who the sponsors are and that the decision to act — or not — sits with the government, not the military.
Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai, who served as Chief of Army Staff from 2015 to 2021 and oversaw the military’s most intensive period of operations against Boko Haram in the Northeast, made the remarks during an appearance on Channels Television’s Politics Today programme.
His comments come days after suicide bombers killed at least 23 people and wounded more than 100 others in coordinated attacks across Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State — one of the deadliest strikes on the city in years.
“You cannot say I should be responsible for naming the financiers of terror,” Buratai said. “Those agencies know why the names are not released. Action should be taken; these individuals are still within society today, and they are known.”
The statement amounts to a public acknowledgement that Nigeria’s security establishment has, for years, possessed intelligence on individuals financing the insurgency that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced nearly two million in the country’s Northeast — and that this intelligence has not translated into arrests, prosecutions or even public disclosure. Buratai offered no explanation for why it had not, directing the question instead at unspecified government agencies and away from the institution he led for six years.
The identity of terrorism financiers has been one of the most sensitive and persistently unresolved questions surrounding Nigeria’s insurgency. Various government bodies, including the Office of the National Security Adviser and the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit, have at different times signalled awareness of financial networks sustaining Boko Haram and its splinter faction, the Islamic State West Africa Province.
Prosecutions have been rare. Public naming has been virtually nonexistent. Buratai’s remarks on Friday suggest the gap between what is known and what is acted upon is not a matter of intelligence failure but of political will.
He was equally direct in separating the army’s institutional responsibility from decisions that he said belonged to civilian government. The rehabilitation programme for repentant Boko Haram fighters — a policy that has drawn sustained criticism from communities in the Northeast who argue that former militants are being reintegrated into societies they terrorised — was, Buratai said, never the army’s idea in the design that was ultimately implemented.
Read also: Terror Financiers Still Within Society – Former COAS Buratai
“The initial concept that we had was that we gave them a timeline to surrender in 2016, and if they surrendered, we gave them a free passage and handed them over to appropriate agencies to rehabilitate them,” he said.
The implication was clear: what happened to those fighters after the army’s involvement ended was somebody else’s decision and somebody else’s responsibility.
The rehabilitation programme, formally known as Operation Safe Corridor, has been a source of controversy since its inception. Survivors of Boko Haram attacks and communities that lost family members to the insurgency have questioned the logic of reintegrating fighters without full accountability for crimes committed. Local officials in Borno and neighbouring states have raised concerns about the adequacy of the deradicalisation process and the capacity of communities to absorb former militants safely. Buratai’s comments suggest the army’s own original conception of the programme was more limited than what eventually emerged.
