Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria has received ‘‘hundreds and hundreds, up to 3,000’’ calls from people across northern Nigeria complaining that loved ones have disappeared after being arrested by the military or police in the past three years of the insurgency of Boko Haram Shehu Sani, anactivist with the organization said on Wednesday.
There are concerns over the number of missing persons purportedly linked to Boko Haram and arrested by security operatives. No one knows where the detainees have wound up, whether they’re in good health or even if they’re still alive.
Distraught relatives, human rights organizations and journalists have asked the army, the police, intelligence services and government officials where the arrested people are, to no avail. No one even knows, or is saying, how many people have been detained.
Human rights monitors are deeply troubled that scores or possibly hundreds of detainees have gone missing in a country where security forces have a reputation for human rights abuses.
Habiba Saadu’s two sons and her daughter were taken on August 3 by soldiers who went from house to house in a night raid in Maiduguri, accusing them of participating in the uprising byBoko Haram, an armed Islamic group that has been waging a bloody war in Africa’s most populous nation for four years.
‘‘Up to now, I have never seen my children!’’ Saadu said.
Daily Review Online gathered that the slow pace of prosecuting suspects by the judiciary is aiding the suspicion by relations of the arrested that they must have been killed.