February 15 2025 | State Media Authorities of the Nigerian Armed Forces and the Police, for instance, have become incurably incorrigible an...
February 15 2025 | State Media
Authorities of the Nigerian Armed Forces and the Police, for instance, have become incurably incorrigible and facilitators, aiders and abettors of state atrocities. They also look as if they are now incurably incapable of taking corrections or being corrected.
Disinformation, misinformation, twisting of facts or facts concoctions, corrupt intelligence, hearsay conclusions and discriminatory policing and soldiering on the grounds of ethnic and religious biases are further found to have become the stock-in-trade of the Nigerian Security Forces (NSFs) and their management authorities particularly in Eastern Nigeria; leading to indiscriminate resort to false labelling, ethno-religious profiling, class stigmatization, mass criminalization, hearsay conclusions, discriminatory law enforcements, criminalization of civil wrongs/civil conducts, recriminalization and conversion of simple offenses and misdemeanours into violent offenses of “terrorism”, “insurgency”, “insurrection”, “treason” and “treasonable felonies”, etc.; using “IPOB/ESN/Biafra Terrorism” as a pretext.
All the above have been responsible for the killing outside the law of tens of thousands of defenceless citizens in the East particularly in the South-East, torture of hundreds of thousands of others and abduction and permanent disappearance of additional thousands in the past nine years and four months or August 30, 2015, to December 31, 2024.
The Nigerian Security Forces (NSFs) and their management authorities are further found by the Special International Report (“Ocean Of Innocent Blood Flowing In The East”) to have operated or coordinated their law enforcement operations outside the laid down rules and regulations including the International Rules of Engagement.
Tens of thousands of defenceless citizens and their properties in the East have been killed or wantonly destroyed outside the law since August 2015 and controversially labelled “gunned down IPOB/ESN terrorists/oil thieves”. The Nigerian Defence Headquarters, for instance, had on December 5th 2024, claimed that it “killed 666 IPOB/ESN terrorists from Jan to Dec 2024” alone.
The Defence Headquarters’ announcement did not include defenceless and unarmed citizens, dominated by male citizens of productive age-brackets, abducted in their thousands from the South-East and some parts of the South-South, face-bagged and secretly bundled in the hours of the blue-law to secret military and other security forces’ locations in the North where this Special International Report found that they have died in their hundreds in secret detention facilities; or those shot and left to die untreated; or those abducted and secretly shot and killed and their lifeless body-persons permanently disappeared without traces till date.
The statistics given by the Nigerian Defence Headquarters also did not include hundreds of others killed outside the law by the country’s police “crack and tactical squads”, numbering over eight (Police Counter Terrorism, Police Rapid Response Squad, Police SARS, Police SWAT, Police Anti Kidnapping, Police STS, Police Anti Cult, Police Highway Patrols, etc.) central formations and dozens of their subordinate formations cutting across the five South-East States and those of Delta, Rivers, etc.
Strikingly noted is the fact that for the first time in the history of human rights and security and safety research and investigation in Nigeria or any part thereof, reports and statements publicly released by Nigerian Security Forces (NSFs); namely: police, army, navy, air force, secret police, paramilitaries and sub-state actor vigilantes have forensically been subjected by the Intersociety Researchers and Investigators to expert-interrogation and unbiased reviews; to fish out facts and fictions contained therein; using available local and international legal and procedural instruments, processes, procedures and safeguards contained in written laws.
“Ocean Of Innocent Blood Flowing In The East” was built on statistics and facts derived from “close and open sources”, including declassified or publicly disclosed reports or statements of Nigerian Armed Forces, Nigeria Police, DSS, National Security Adviser, Attorney General of the Federation, Chief of Army Staff, Chief of Defence Staff/Defence Headquarters, Inspector General of Police and past and present persons in charge of such offices.
Serialized by:
Obi Nna
For: Lagos State Media
Edited by:
Obiageli Mboma
For: Lagos State Media
Published by:
Chibuike Nebeokike
For: Lagos State Media
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