Col. Abdussalam Ude died resisting gunmen at his New Karu home Monday night; FCT Police say the attack happened in Nasarawa, not the capital.
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NASARAWA, July 29, 2026
A senior military intelligence officer is dead after gunmen tried to drag him from his home near the FCT border Monday night, and by Wednesday the security agencies still hadn't settled on whose jurisdiction the killing falls under.
Col. Abdussalam A. Ude, an intelligence officer with counter-terrorism experience in Nigeria's North-east and past postings in Chad and France, was ambushed at around 10:45 p.m. on Monday, July 27, as he arrived home during heavy rain. Multiple accounts agree he fought back rather than go quietly, and that resistance is what got him killed, with the attackers shooting him repeatedly before fleeing. His wife, his driver and a security aide were also injured in the struggle.
Where exactly this happened is the part still in dispute. The Defence Intelligence Agency initially placed the attack at Ude's residence in the Phase 5 Army Housing Estate, Kurudu, an address inside Abuja. The FCT Police Command pushed back hard on that framing Wednesday, insisting the shooting actually occurred in Badna, New Karu Local Government Area, which sits in Nasarawa State, not the capital.
The command went further, criticizing what it called the spread of "false and unverified" security reports and urging reporters and social media users to verify details with authorities before publishing.
For readers across the Middle Belt, the location dispute matters beyond bureaucratic pride. New Karu and the string of communities along the Nasarawa-FCT boundary have functioned for years as a soft edge where criminal gangs move between two policing jurisdictions, complicating pursuit and accountability. The FCT Commissioner of Police has now ordered additional operational and intelligence assets into communities bordering Nasarawa specifically to close that gap.
Ude was due for promotion to brigadier general next year. He was a native of Enugu State. His death lands amid a broader reshuffle of the military's command structure in the region, the Army has just stood up new divisional headquarters, with the newly created 5 Division in Makurdi taking responsibility for Benue, Nasarawa and Kogi, and 9 Division in Ilorin covering Kwara and Niger.
Whether that reorganization changes anything for the kind of targeted, resistance-triggered violence that killed Ude remains to be seen this is a still-developing story, and the exact chain of events, motive and any arrests have not been confirmed by either agency as of this writing.
What to watch: whether police name suspects or a motive, whether the jurisdictional dispute between FCT Police and the DIA gets formally resolved, and whether the promised troop deployment to the Nasarawa-FCT boundary actually materializes.
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