ABUJA: Nigeria’s top-ranking army commander Lieutenant General Ibrahim Attahiru and other officers were killed on Friday when their plane crashed in bad weather in the country’s north, officials said.
Chief of Army Staff Attahiru was only appointed by President Muhammadu Buhari in January as part of a shakeup of the top military command to better fight surging violence and a more than decade-long insurgency.
Attahiru died as news also emerged that Nigeria’s Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau had himself been seriously wounded or possibly killed after clashes with a rival IS-allied faction.
President Buhari, a former general first elected in 2015, has been under increasing pressure from allies and critics alike over his government’s handling of mounting security problems in Africa’s most populous country.
In a statement, Buhari said the crash “was one mortal blow to our underbelly, at a time our armed forces are poised to end the security challenges facing the country”. The army spokesman said on Twitter that ten other officers including the plane’s crew also died in the crash in north Kaduna state.
The incident occurred as the plane was landing at the Kaduna International Airport “due to inclement weather,” the armed forces said in a statement.
Nigeria’s military has been battling an insurgency in the northeast since 2009, a conflict that has killed more than 40,000 and displaced around two million more. Attahiru had once been in charge of leading the frontline offensive against Boko Haram’s commander Shekau in the northeast in 2017.
Local intelligence sources said Shekau had been seriously wounded this week when IS-allied rivals attacked his stronghold in the Sambisa forest in the northeastern state of Borno. — AFP
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