allAfrica.com: Nigeria: Human Rights - FG Urged to Investigate Police Killings (Page 1 of 2)

The Federal Government has been called upon to launch an independent public inquiry in light of official statistics indicating that police have shot and killed more than 8,000 Nigerians since 2000.

Above call was made by the global rights organisation, Human Rights Watch (HRW) in a statement issued in New York, in which figures showed 785 killed in just three months this year, while the true number of people killed by the police since 2000 may exceed 10,000.

The group, while reacting to recent news reports reiterated that on November 14, the Inspector General of Police Mike Okiro announced that 785 suspected 'armed robbers' were shot and killed in gunfire exchanges with the police between June and the beginning of September 2007.

According to the same set of statistics, 1,628 armed robbers were arrested during the same period. Police personnel also killed one person for every two firearms they managed to recover, the group added.

"It's stunning that the police killed half as many 'armed robbery suspects' as they managed to arrest during Okiro's first 90 days," said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "And it's scandalous that leading police officials seem to regard the routine killing of Nigerian citizens, criminal suspects or not, as a point of pride."

Decrying the police claims, the organisation said the figures suggest that police have routinely resorted to disproportionate and illegal use of lethal force and may have committed multiple extra judicial killings in the course of police operations.

"Such indications are especially worrying in light of numerous well-documented cases of deaths of detainees in police custody. Almost as disturbing as the numbers themselves is that leading police officials appear to regard these grim statistics as an indication of effective police work rather than as a scandal. Okiro announced the statistics to the House of Representatives' Police Affairs Committee in a speech chronicling the achievements of his first three months in office".

The global monitoring group claimed Nigeria's police force remains mired in deeply entrenched patterns of torture, corruption, murder, and other forms of human rights abuse; and that torture remains a routine part of police interrogation, where police officers have carried out numerous extra judicial killings of suspects in their custody.

A 2005 report by Human Rights Watch documented systemic patterns of torture and extra judicial killings in the police force, and in March 2007 the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture found that torture remained 'an intrinsic part of how law enforcement services operate' in Nigeria.

Many parts of Nigeria experience extremely high levels of violent crime, owing partly to rising poverty, high unemployment and the proliferation of small arms throughout the country. Dozens of Nigerian police officers die in the line of duty every year, the watch-dog said.

Nigeria's police generally lack capacity to deal with the challenges they face. Police officers are poorly trained, ill-equipped, and poorly remunerated. Some human rights abuses carried out by the police are partly a response to public pressure to reduce the high levels of violent crime.

Nigerian civil society groups and Human Rights Watch's own investigations have revealed that, lacking the means to carry out effective criminal investigations, some police officers extract confessions through torture, or murder suspects in their custody who police believe to be guilty. Other cases represent a simple abuse of power targeting ordinary civilians.

Police officers, the statement said, routinely label individuals they kill as 'armed robbers' who fired on police. According to police statistics, all of the thousands of individuals shot and killed by police officers were 'armed robbers'.

The group claimed credible government investigations into allegations of disproportionate use of force or murder have been extremely rare and the facts on the ground often belie the claims of police officials.

In June 2005, the murder of six young people at a police checkpoint in Abuja generated a nationwide scandal that led to an investigation and criminal charges against the officers involved, but that case was an exception to prevailing norms. Reported cases of investigations into police killings have been extremely rare and accountability even less common.

In August 2006, police arrested and publicly 'paraded' 12 armed robbery suspects in the Abia State town of Umuahia; the 12 were later found among a pile of 16 corpses deposited near a local mortuary. Police officials claimed that all 16 were armed robbers who had somehow been involved in an exchange of gunfire with the police. No investigation was carried out.

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