Five policemen attached to the Abraka Police Division in Delta State were killed in an ambush on Monday by a gang of armed Fulani herdsmen who riddled Hilux van with bullets.
The attack on the police team came on the same day Usman Ndanbabo, an Assistant Commissioner of Police (ACP) in charge of the Ughelli Area Command who was shot on Sunday night by suspected assassins, was confirmed dead at a private hospital in Warri.
“He was returning from an outing at about 8p.m in his Nissan SUV when he noticed that a Toyota car [was] trailing him. He tried fleeing from his car when he got to the roundabout opposite the palace of the Ovie of Ughelli along Isoko Road only for his assailants to open fire on him shooting him in the back and his stomach and [leaving] him for dead,” a senior police officer at the command stated.
He added that Ndanbabo was immediately rushed to a private clinic for medical attention in the area, where, on the account of the gravity of the wounds, he was referred to another private clinic in Warri.
The four policemen had gone to visit the border area of Eku and Oria communities which has been in dispute between an oil company and the locals when they ran into the ambush.
The station officer and a member of the Umiaghwa-Abraka vigilante who had accompanied the police team to the area narrowly escaped death as they were in another car ahead of the security team when the herdsmen struck.
“One of the policemen died on the spot while the three others died on their way to the hospital,” the vigilante member disclosed when contacted.
The attack on the police team is the third in four months. A similar incident took place in Ohoro community, in Ughelli North Local Government Area, when suspected herdsmen dressed in military fatigues ambushed a team of police officers also led by the late Mr. Ndanbabo, who was also reported to have collapsed during the incident.
