Phil Okose, Onitsha
A human rights organization, International Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law, Intersociety, disclosed weekend in Onitsha, Anambra State, that it relies more on independent reports than government accounts of kidnapping and other violent crimes that occure across Nigeria especially in the Southeast, South-south and Middle-Belt Nigeria.
Citing the recent kidnap of 15 NYSC members in Owerri, Imo state capital, Intersociety said, by their several findings across Nigeria in recent times, crime scene incidents including abduction scene accounts and figures given by the Nigerian security forces particularly police, military and intelligence establishments have been found to be widely unbelievable and unreliable.
According to the chairman of Intersociety, comrade Emeka Umeagbalasi, “As a matter of fact, independent sources especially from victims and their families and vehicular conveying authorities are found to be much more reliable than those given by security agencies.
“Apart from constant promotion of false gallantry by security forces and managing of casualty or incident figures, they are also found to be engaged in cover-ups and suppression of facts on the ground.
“In the South-East, false labeling, ethno-religious profiling, hasty and hearsay conclusions, class stigmatization and mass criminalization have remained their stock-in-trade in matters of criminal intelligence gathering and criminal investigations and associated arrests, arbitrary detention, abductions, torture, killings and disappearances.
“Deliberate operational loopholes have severally trailed security forces’ “rescue operations” particularly in Meddle-Belt, South-South and South-East Nigeria; to the extent that security forces’ reports in places like Kogi, Kwara, Nasarawa, Enugu and Imo, among others are found to be gravely conflicting and riddled with concocted or doctored facts.
“One of the recent such sad cases was the hasty and unverifiable announcement of the rescue of passengers abducted recently which later turned out to be complicated and twisted. The August 2026 abductions in Kogi and Benue States, including the abduction of 15 NYSC Corpers, inclusive of at least ten Igbo Corpers are clear cases in point.
“Apart from clear conflicting accounts given by police and the military in the areas, some families immediately cried out, debunking the police and the military “rescue reports”; insisting that their beloved ones were yet to be freed. An Anambra family, with their abducted daughter from Nri and married in Enugu-Ukwu, went as far as openly launching a tens-of-millions-of-naira appeal fund to pay the jihadist kidnappers to secure the release of their daughter whom security forces claimed to have rescued. Instances are too many to mention”, he stated.
To buttress his claim, Umeagbalasi went further to reveal that one of the very few recent unquestionable rescue operation reports announced by security forces was the rescue of the abducted school children in Oyo State adding that contrarily, most, if not all the security forces rescue or law enforcement operations in the South-East are riddled with disfigurement of facts and cover-ups.
He accused those deployed security forces in the South-East, particularly the police, the military and the intelligence establishments of widely maintaining a permanent culture of protecting jihadist Fulani Herdsmen and their jihadist activities.
“These, they are strongly suspected to have done under the watchful eyes and conspiracy of the present South-East Governments, to the extent that greater number of such jihadist atrocities are hastily blamed by the above named security forces on “IPOB/ESN” or “unknown gunmen of Igbo extraction”.
“Some security forces-linked ‘False-Flagged Operations’ are also sometimes reported by non-state actors across the South-East and randomly and discriminately blamed on wrong parties such as “IPOB/ESN”, in furtherance and deepening of hate policing, ethno-religious profiling, mass criminalization and class stigmatization.
InterSociety has severally received feedbacks from relatives of some kidnap victims whose families were contacted from kidnappers’ dens by the jihadist kidnappers or the victims themselves, for random payments. Such families, advised by InterSociety to contact the police or other security agencies; after informing us that their abducted relatives called from Jihadist Fulani kidnappers, got back to us to inform us that “they have been strongly advised by some persons closed to security quarters in the South-East to avoid mentioning Fulani Herdsmen when contacting the police or army or intelligence establishments, especially if they wanted their reported matters to be handled”. Such feedbacks have been given to us by those that approached security formations within Anambra State, among others; during which they were advised to mention “Unknown gunmen or IPOB/ESN” as those behind the abduction of their loved ones.
“InterSociety therefore makes bold to say that we are trusting independent accounts particularly in the ongoing handling of the abducted NYSC Corpers and other travelers in Imo State than those being dished out by security forces particularly the police and the military.
“Such trusted and believable independent accounts include: independent accounts from families of the victims (such as biodata of their relatives and primary information regarding their original transits, etc.); accounts from the owners and management of the abducted buses (such as names in their passengers’ manifests, number of those that boarded and their takeoffs, incident destinations, their time and dates); and independent accounts of those eventually freed or rescued (such as identities and religious faiths of those that abducted them, their treatments in captivity and how they were freed or rescued through state actor or non-state actor interventions),” he revealed.
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