Gunmen kill at least 12 forest guards in northcentral Nigeria

# Gunmen kill at least 12 forest guards in northcentral Nigeria

At least 12 forest guards have been killed in an attack in Oke-Ode, a community in Nigeria’s Kwara State, in another violent episode in the country’s northcentral region. The AP report says police found the bodies after gunmen struck on Sunday, and four survivors are now being treated in hospital.

The event date is 2025-09-29. Police said no group immediately claimed responsibility. That is an important detail because it keeps the story away from speculation about motive or affiliation while the investigation is still developing.

The victims were forest guards, a job that suggests they were operating in a security role tied to local land use or rural protection. The AP excerpt does not explain the exact nature of their assignment, but it does say the attack targeted a community in Oke-Ode and that the bodies were discovered by police officers and members of the National Forest Security Service.

The report places the attack in a wider pattern of conflict in Nigeria’s northern region, where clashes between herders and farmers are common. Those disputes often center on land and water access, and they have helped fuel repeated violence across the area. The AP also notes that herders and farmers hold sharply different views about grazing routes and farmland use.

Kwara State governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq responded by calling on the military to confront the attackers and urging residents not to turn against one another. His comments reflect the dual challenge facing local authorities: responding to armed violence while trying to prevent the attack from deepening communal mistrust.

The report also says the victims sustained multiple gunshot wounds. That detail underlines the brutality of the attack and suggests the guards were overwhelmed by direct fire rather than caught in an accident or a smaller-scale confrontation.

This is not an isolated national-security problem. The AP points out that in June, at least 150 people were killed in a single attack in Benue state, also in northcentral Nigeria. The comparison is meant to show scale, not to tie the two incidents together. But it does underscore how severe the violence landscape has become in the region.

The immediate questions now are practical ones: who carried out the attack, whether the survivors can identify the gunmen and what additional protection will be deployed in the area. The source does not answer those questions, so the article should not attempt to.

What can be said with confidence is that the attack in Oke-Ode left at least 12 forest guards dead, four people hospitalized and local authorities searching for answers in a region already strained by recurring violence.