More Than Two Hundred Men Came for Ayilamo at Dusk. Four Policemen Died Holding Them Off, Seven Villagers Died Anyway, and the Village Says the Army Post Up the Road Never Picked Up.
More than two hundred armed men came into a Benue village on Thursday. The police met them; four died. The village says the army post nearby never answered.
Manasseh Umishi watched it from a rooftop. He is the security secretary for Tombo ward, the man whose job is to make the calls, and on Thursday evening he made them from above the fighting, with the attackers in the lanes below him. He counted more than two hundred. He heard them speaking Fulani and shouting Allahu Akbar, and he heard the police shooting back.
Ayilamo is a farming village in Logo, in the northeast corner of Benue State, on the road that runs from Abinsi through Anyiin to Wukari in Taraba. Residents told TruthNigeria it is about 98 percent Christian and mostly Catholic. It has been hit before. A resident named James Udough told The Sun that this was the second time in a month that mobile policemen posted to Ayilamo had been killed there.
The Benue State Police Command confirmed the attack the next day in a statement issued for the commissioner, Cletus Nwadiogbu. It says "suspected armed bandits in large numbers" came in at 6:12 pm on September 10, that mobile police units, tactical teams and conventional officers "engaged the attackers in a sustained operation which lasted for seven hours," and that the attackers pulled back into the forest with heavy casualties in the early hours of September 11. Four police officers were killed. Their bodies were found afterward, the statement says, "during search and rescue operations in the surrounding bushes." Seven civilians were also found dead and taken to a mortuary.
The police statement does not say who the attackers were, beyond bandits. It does not say what the village says: that an army forward operating base sat about two hundred meters from where the attack began, and that nobody there answered.
