A civil society organisation (CSO) has made fresh allegations security personnel have killed an unspecified number of pro-Biafra activists in Anambra State.
International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law (Intersociety) raised alarm, claiming it had “un-concocted and shocking evidence” of how unarmed activists, in their dozens, were shot at close range, maimed, abducted, murdered and dumped at the Anambra State Government owned Onitsha General Hospital by soldiers of the Onitsha Military Cantonment.
They were said to have been headed by one Col Issah Abdullahi.
Chief of Army Staff, Turkur Buratai, and Inspector General of Police, Solomon Arase, were implicated for alleged complicity.
“As a research and grassroots oriented rights organization in Nigeria, located at the heart of the Niger and Southeast of the country, we are appalled and saddened at all times reading and listening to lies or falsehoods of intensified magnitude dish out on daily basis by the military and the police authorities in the country as reasons for their actions or omissions to act in the dastardly act,” said Emeka Umeagbalasi, Intersociety Board Chairman.
“The worst of it all is that the present Federal Government of Nigeria’s official policy is quadrupled into repression, violence, falsehood and propaganda,” he said.
“As we speak, for instance, no reasonable person can say for certainty whether maimed, battered, lacerated and detained Nigerian Shiite Muslim leader, Sheik Ibrahim Zaky El-Zaky, is still alive or dead following his over 90 days of solitary incarceration in the hands of coercive agencies of the Federal Government of Nigeria.”
Umeagbalasi reminded under the International Law and the Humanitarian Principles, Nigeria as a member of the United Nations was mandatorily obligated to adhere strictly to the basic or fundamental standards of its International Law and Humanitarian Principles.
The allegations are the latest in a series of tensions around protests for the independence of Biafra, a secessionist state in then southeastern Nigeria that existed from 1967 to 1970.
