On October 22, Monday Bakor and Queen Nwazuo were in their shop in Oyigbo, Rivers state when they heard soldiers shooting outside. He says a bullet came in through the door and killed Ms. Nwazuo, his fiancée.

Ms. Nwazuo was in her final year studying banking and finance at Abia State Polytechnic, and she ran the salon/POS shop alongside Mr. Bakor. The shop is attached to the house where they lived.

There has been turmoil in Oyigbo for weeks where police stations have been destroyed and people have been killed, including police and soldiers. The state government blames the pro-Biafra separatist group IPOB for the attacks on state officials and facilities.

On October 21, Governor Nyesom Wike declared a 24-hour curfew in areas including Oyigbo and made an executive order banning IPOB in the state. He also told security agencies to ‘fish out and resolutely deal with any member of IPOB’.

After that, residents of Oyigbo said soldiers have invaded the town and shot people indiscriminately – even going into houses where people stayed indoors because of the curfew.

One resident named Laura tells Peoples Gazette that she and her family initially fled to neighbouring Eleme when the crisis began but returned to the town on October 27 with the hope that the crisis was over.

She says, “[At first] military officers were only moving from house to house to look for their guns, which had been taken by some miscreants who had killed police officers and burned police stations. The soldiers even told us not to be scared when we went to the market, but they grew hostile toward us when Wike did not lift the Oyigbo curfew.”

The government has lifted the curfew in other areas, but Oyigbo is still under a full-day curfew. Markets and shops are closed and access to food and medicine is restricted, according to some accounts.

Maxwell, another resident, said more soldiers arrived in Oyigbo after the state’s ban on IPOB. He said the government falsely accuses IPOB of instigating the turmoil.

“Those who carried out the protest and actions were just youths protesting against police brutality in Obigbo, Igbo-Etche and Oil Mill, not IPOB,” he said.

The army has denied attacking people in Oyigbo and police say they are not aware about the alleged military invasion.

Many residents of Oyigbo come from the southeast because Oyigbo shares a boundary with Aba in Abia state. Also, the people of Oyigbo speak a language related to Igbo.

Given the nature of that relationship between Oyigbo locals and the Igbo people, there is common belief that IPOB has a substantial presence in Oyigbo and that the group’s activities there may be extremist.