Suspected armed bandits launched a pre-dawn attack on Agwara community in Niger State on Sunday, overpowering police officers, torching the local police station and part of a church building, and abducting about five residents, the state police command has confirmed.
Police Public Relations Officer SP Wasiu Abiodun said in a statement issued in Minna on Sunday that the raid began around 3:40 am when the assailants stormed the Agwara Police Station.
Officers on tactical duty exchanged fire with the attackers, but the bandits eventually gained the upper hand and deployed what is believed to be dynamite to set the station on fire.
“The assailants subsequently moved to the United Methodist Church (UMC) in the community, where they burnt part of the church building,” Abiodun stated.
The group then spread to other sections of the town, seizing approximately five people whose identities remain unknown.
Security agencies have begun investigations and reinforced patrols to apprehend the perpetrators and rescue those abducted. “The situation is being monitored, and further developments will be communicated in due course,” the spokesman added.
Sunday’s incident marks the latest escalation in a prolonged wave of violence in Agwara Local Government Area, one of several parts of Niger State repeatedly targeted by armed criminal groups.
Only weeks earlier, on 3 January, bandits struck Kasuwan Daji village in the same local government area, tying up and killing at least 42 men, abducting women and children, and burning homes and the village market in a coordinated assault that lasted several hours.
That attack formed part of a broader surge of raids across parts of the state between late December 2025 and early January 2026.
In November 2025, armed men abducted more than 300 students and a dozen staff from St. Mary’s School in Papiri, in what became one of the largest single school kidnappings recorded in recent years. The victims were later released in stages.
Niger State, in north-central Nigeria and the country’s largest by land mass, has endured years of escalating banditry that has spilled over from neighbouring north-western states. The violence, which traces its roots to resource conflicts, cattle rustling and ethnic tensions in the wider northern region since the mid-2010s, has grown into organised criminal operations involving mass abductions, killings and destruction of property.
Hard-to-reach terrain, porous borders and stretched security deployment have allowed armed groups to establish strongholds in remote areas, displacing thousands of residents, crippling farming and trading activities, and placing sustained pressure on both state and federal authorities.
