South-East Based Coalition of Human Rights Organizations, SBCHROs, has accused security forces of killing 80 members of the Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, and their supporters between August 30, 2015 and February 9, 2016.
The accusation came on a day President Muhammadu Buhari vowed that Biafra will not stand. The coalition also estimated those maimed at 170, just as it put the total number of those arrested, detained, charged or kept in captivity without trial at 400.
In what it termed as the concluding part of its letter to the Chief of the Defence Staff, Gen Abayomi Gabriel Olonisakin, and the Minister of Interior, Gen Abdulrahman Dambazzau (rtd), entitled: ‘Ceaseless Killings Of Unarmed Citizens In Nigeria: Why Security Chiefs Must Desist From Provoking More Insurgencies Capable Of Plunging Nigeria Into Syrian Style (Concluding Part),’ SBCHROs alleged that the army, police and navy specifically killed 22 IPOB members on February 9, 2016 in the compound of the National High School in Aba, Abia State; maimed over 30 others, murdered 13 of them and dumped their bodies inside a burrow pit located, along Aba-Port Harcourt Road in Abia State.
The group added that the army was responsible for 60 percent of the killings, police 30 percent and others including the navy, 10 percent, stressing that the video clips of the Aba National High School massacre and the Aba-Port Harcourt Road burrow pit dumping of 13 murdered IPOB members were available on request.
The letter was copied to the UN Secretary General and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, among others. Efforts to reach the Director of Defence Information, Colonel Rabe Abubakar, last night, to comment on the coalition’s allegations proved abortive.
