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Irete, Owerri West LGA, Imo State — September 14, 2026

Two people were killed and two others injured on Monday when suspected armed herdsmen opened fire on a group inspecting farmland in Umunjo community, Irete, Owerri West Local Government Area of Imo State.

According to witnesses, four people — including a woman — had gone to inspect an undeveloped plot of land for sale near Irete Secondary Technical School when gunmen opened fire on them. Two of the group escaped and raised the alarm; the dead were identified as Chigaemezu Ozuzu, a vigilante operative from Umunjo who was providing security for the inspection team, and a second victim from Amakohia-Ubi Autonomous Community who was involved in the land transaction. Video circulating on social media showed the two bodies lying a few metres apart, with a voice heard saying, “My man is gone, Fulani has touched Irete again.” Some reports indicated that not everyone who took part in the inspection visit had been accounted for as of Monday night, though this has not been confirmed as a formal abduction by police.

The Imo State Police Command confirmed the incident. Police Public Relations Officer DSP Henry Okoye said Commissioner of Police Audu Garba Bosso ordered the immediate deployment of enhanced security operations — including the Anti-Kidnapping Unit and Violent Crime Response Unit — to Owerri West and Oguta LGAs, covering Ejemekwuru, Ogbaku, Izombe, Irete, Umuguma, Okuku, Ndegwu, Amakohia-Ubi, and adjoining communities. Bosso condemned the killings and directed relevant units to intensify efforts to identify and arrest those responsible.

Residents said the attack is the latest in a string of incidents attributed to suspected herdsmen in Irete and neighbouring communities over recent months, which they say has left more than four people dead, others injured, and additional abduction cases recorded in the area, forcing some farmers to abandon their farmland out of fear.

A widening national security failure, critics say

The Irete killings add to mounting criticism that the federal government has failed to curtail the activities of armed herdsmen and bandits across Nigeria, with analysts and advocacy groups pointing to a pattern in which violence long concentrated in the North Central states — Benue, Plateau, Nasarawa, and southern Kaduna — has increasingly spread into the South East.

According to research published by Intersociety, a Nigeria-based civil liberties and rule-of-law advocacy group, jihadist-linked Fulani herdsmen and allied armed groups now occupy at least 950 locations across more than 800 communities in the South East’s five states — Abia, Imo, Enugu, Anambra, and Ebonyi — representing roughly 40% of the zone’s nearly 1,940 communities. The group’s separate research attributed approximately 80% of an estimated 9,800 killings in the South East since 2015 to jihadist-linked attacks, with Enugu (1,800 deaths, 2016–2025) and Imo (2,100 deaths, 2020–2025) recording the highest tolls among the five states. Nextier’s independently compiled conflict database separately recorded at least 2,349 deaths nationwide from herder-farmer conflict between 2020 and 2024, with hundreds more in 2025 alone.

Critics of the federal government’s response argue that despite years of recurring attacks, ranching and grazing-route proposals, and repeated security deployments, the same clusters of communities continue to be targeted with little sign of sustained protection — with Monday’s Irete attack, coming just after a similar deadly incident nearby, cited as the latest example.

A contested picture

The characterization of the violence as a one-directional, religiously or ethnically targeted campaign is itself disputed. Some Igbo commentators, including public affairs voice Joe Igbokwe, have argued that a portion of the violence attributed to “Fulani herdsmen” in parts of the South East reflects intra-communal or criminal violence rather than organized herder attacks. Separately, armed groups linked to the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) have themselves been implicated in deadly reprisal attacks on Fulani herders in the region — including a 2021 killing of 19 herders, among them women and children, in Anambra’s Igbariam community — complicating a picture in which both herder-linked violence against farming communities and retaliatory or vigilante violence against herders have been documented by rights monitors.

The federal government had not issued a statement specific to the Irete attack as of this writing.