EXTRA-JUDICIAL KILLINGS IN ENUGU STATE NIGERIA, VERY ATROCIOUS!

To Governor Sullivan Iheanacho Chime, Icheoku says, please tell the Nigerian police force to back-off and stop murdering your people and residents of Enugu State! They must cease and desist from perpetrating further acts of violence on an unarmed civilians, citizens who are usually made scape-goats in situations leading up to their mass killings. If the police have provable cases against these suspects, why not establish same at the law courts? Say no to police vigilantism in Enugu State, Governor! Please say to the police, E N O U G H !

The situation becomes more pathetic when one is minded of the fact that the Nigeria Inspector General of Police Ogbonna Onovo is also from Enugu State; and is allowing this bloodletting to go on unabated, tarnishing the image of both his police force and his state of origin? When all these people are killed and for whatever reason or transgression, who shall then remain as to be governed? As the chief law officer of Enugu State, your number one job assignment is to protect every resident of the state, no matter how lowly placed in the ladder of society he or she might be on? At least let these "suspect" have their day in court after which justice could be meted out to them, one way or the other; but not before they are convicted of a known death-offense crime! This is the 21st century and Nigeria already have enough black-eyes to add an additional one! A black-eye coming from a continuing, systematic and endemic police killing of innocent youths of Enugu State and surreptitiously burying them in mass, unmarked graves for cover-up? At least one Canon of criminal law is that everyone is innocent until proved guilty, so why this vigilantism by the Nigerian police?

We do not belong to the school of thought doubting or questioning the veracity of the report by Amnesty International or British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), as we are fully seized of police practices in Nigeria. All we are saying is for you, Governor Chime, to put a stop to this barbaric disregard of your peoples' human rights and violation of their right to live. If they must be killed for whatever offense they might allegedly have committed, please let such criminality of guilt be established before a court of law and thereafter, let the tree fall wherever it pleases. It is indeed regrettable that what would not happen in other states or regions of Nigeria is being allowed and tolerated in Enugu State with impunity, and without the chief executive of the state standing up to defend the people he swore an oath to defend. Enugu state has had its fair share of massacre during Biafra and nobody, including the Hausa Police Commissioner Mohamed Zarewa, should be allowed to continue a systematic annihilation of a people, where the then Hausa-Fulani led Nigerian army stopped in 1970.

There is no justification whatsoever for the ongoing mass murder and attempt at cover-up in Enugu State by the Nigeria Police, and this must stop forthwith! It is indeed laughable, the pathetic Nigeria Police spokesman DCP Ojukwu Emmanuel Ojukwu, trying to deny what is widely of general knowledge, that Nigeria Police engages in extra-judicial killings? Spokesman Ojukwu flatly and contemptuously denied that what BBC reported ever happened; and stating it was 'false?' What a baloney! In his response to the story, Spokesman Ojukwu said, “the fact that the report is from a foreign media does not make it the gospel truth. These people just come up with names that do not exist and raise gross allegations, but I can assure you that this will be adequately investigated.” Now Icheoku asks, why investigate something you already concluded was false? Is it a case of the message or the messenger that is at stake here? Isn't it obvious that the report is coming from foreign media simply because the local media would not do it? They are in bed with what is going wrong with and in Nigeria, and lack the guts to challenge the police or publish the story, because the journalists do not want to become part of the statistics. No, none of them wants to be killed like their late colleagues Dele Giwa and Bayo Ojo; two journalists who were killed because of some incubating investigative stories!

Icheoku asks spokesman Ojukwu, was 'Apo-Six' a hoax too? What about Jos crisis? What about Boko Haram and the cases and victims are endless? The problem with Nigeria is that they are always sly with the truth and instead of addressing any observed problems headlong; always try to skirt around it, looking for an explanation or reason why the problem exist instead of a solution thereto. Would this Ojukwu explain to the listening world, what crime in Nigeria, his police force has ever conclusively investigated till date? Not Bola Ige's murder, not Boko Haram's Muhammad Yusuf, not Dele Giwa, not Bayo Ojo, not Apo-Six, not Halliburton and not Siemens? So what is the world's confidence that this time, this mass murder in Enugu State shall be an exception? To Ojukwu and his police, Icheoku says, we have heard such bluster of investigation before; and we would rather you just call off your uniformed merchants of death from ploughing the streets of Enugu; and desist from further shedding of Innocent blood. That will be more plausible line of action; admitted it is too much to ask of a Nigerian police notorious for its brutality and corruption; but hey, you never know!

Icheoku totally and fully backs the British Broadcasting Corporation report on the extra-judicial, indiscriminate mass killings by the Nigerian Police, of "suspects" in Enugu State; and their bodies are deposited at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital Enugu mortuary; with mass burial conducted periodically, with many more bodies waiting for the same fate! That over seventy bodies were stock-piled atop each other in two rooms at the mortuary is also an understandable possibility of a police force that frequently engages in extra-judicial policing? It is symptomatic of the Nigerian police whose "kill and go" tendencies is of general knowledge. According to the report, lots of young Enugu men and boys are frequently being murdered by the Nigerian police and their corpses dumped in the University mortuary; without any record of prosecution and on several occasion ordered the hospital official to give them mass burials in order to de-congest an overwhelmed morgue facilities; and as a cover-up to their illegality?

Imagine a police commissioner, in answer to the atrocities of his uniformed killers, said, "You are asking about the young men, why are you not asking about the policemen who died? We people, we lose our lives too.” Icheoku says, so this commissioner of police is justifying his pseudo-vengeance mission in Enugu State; instead of dutifully policing of the state for which he was sent to Enugu State, he is busy killing his suspects? Don't this police commissioner know that it is a necessary part of being a policeman that certain risks attach, including the risks of being probably killed in a shoot-out? And admitted for the sake of argument, that because some of his men died in a shoot-out, therefore these suspects will be killed; Icheoku asks, why not let the court determine their guilt and pass sentences accordingly? Icheoku congratulates Erwin van der Borght, the Director of Amnesty International’s Africa Programme, for stepping up to the plate and exposing this dark-side of the Nigerian Police, which local journalists will not do for fear of their lives; admitted with a probable cause though!

Icheoku concurs that Nigeria police don’t only kill people by shooting them; they also torture them to death, often while they are in detention. Majority of the cases also go un-investigated and likewise do the police officers responsible go unpunished. The families of the victims usually get no justice or redress; and most never even find out what happened to their loved ones or are ever handed their bodies for proper burial. The Nigeria Police frequently claim that their victims were “armed robbers” killed in “shoot-outs” with the police or while trying to escape custody? Claims which to every body's knowledge are false and very improbable! Killings which aged-practice has now made somewhat an acceptable practice within the Nigerian police service. As a panacea, the National Assembly should consider repealing or amending the “Nigeria Police Force Order 237”, which permits police officers to shoot suspects and detainees who attempt to escape or avoid arrest – whether or not they pose a threat to life?

What an impermissible broad-blank cheque for murder; which Nigerian police frequently cashes and uses to commit, justify and cover up illegal killings of innocent civilians and citizens! According to this blood-thirsty mad commissioner of police Zarewa, "any criminal can get a lawyer and make up a story" and therefore he would not let them hire a lawyer and would rather kill them extra-judicially before such opportunity ever avails them? What a lawless banana republic! What an unjustifiable police vigilantism by a Nigeria police force which is notoriously very corrupt and brutal. In one commentator's words, "The east of Nigeria, in terms of policing, is crazy!" Icheoku says, Governor Sullivan Iheanacho Chime should please coral forthwith, this crazed-out police commissioner Zarewa and his men before they do irreparable damage to Enugu State's image and her human resources! Please try these suspects before a law court and do not let these arbitrary extra-judicial 'police sentences of executions!' Such a pivot will keep the lawyers busy while also maintaining human rights records as well as sustaining Enugu peoples' right to live!