Nigerian Army gets challenged by IPOB

Agitators for the Biafra state, the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) has challenged the Nigerian Army to produce weapons allegedly seized from the agitators.

This is coming after the kill­ing of protesters on May 30, 2016 in the South East and South-South states.

The group particularly asked the Army to publicly display the purported weap­ons it seized from the Biafra agitators who were killed in Onitsha on the said day.

In a statement by its spokespersons, Mr. Clif­ford Iroanya and Mr. Emma Nmezu, IPOB said that the claims by the Army that it killed the agitators because they were violent were only face-saving and lacked any proof.

IPOB challenged the Army to produce the weapons seized from the agitators to prove its case.

The statement read in part: “To justify the use of live am­munition on Biafrans, the Army spokesman, one Col. Gambo claimed that Biafrans ‘employed firearms, crude weapons as well as other vola­tile cocktails such as acid and dynamites.’

“Where are the arms and ammunition that the Army re­covered from the ‘violent Bia­frans’?

“Is the Army actually re­ferring to the acid which they poured on the bodies of dead Biafrans as they lay in mass graves which was dug at the cemetery inside Onitsha Army Barracks?

“Is the Army aware that information leaked through somebody who supervised the burial of over 100 dead bod­ies of Biafrans in mass graves inside the Onitsha Army Bar­racks?

“How can the Nigerian Army explain how people who were murdered in their sleep on the night of May 29th sud­denly became violent? How can someone be sleeping and be protesting at the same time?

“Col. Gambo, in reference to the damning report, averred that Amnesty ‘have decided to inundate the general pub­lic with an anecdote of unver­ified narratives in order to dis­credit the Nigerian Army in the course of carrying out its constitutional duties despite the inexplicable premeditated and unprovoked attacks in the hands of the violent pro-Bia­fran mob.’

“Also, in citing legal sup­port for their heinous crime, Col. Gambo stated that: ‘The Nigerian Army, in syner­gy with other security agen­cies under its constitutional mandates for Military Aid to Civil Authority (MACA) and Military Aid to Civil Power (MACP) acted responsive­ly in order to de-escalate the deteriorating security scenar­io in-situ.’

“IPOB wishes to state cate­gorically that there is no place in the 320 sections and seven schedules of the constitution of Nigeria where the Army is empowered to shoot at un­armed peaceful civilians, espe­cially those who are sleeping,” IPOB said.