Some soldiers, police officers, men of the Nigeria Air Force, have been
arrested for sexually assaulting female Internally Displaced persons in
various camps. Inspector General of Police, Idris Ibrahim, disclosed
this yesterday while speaking with some senior officers at the Force
Headquarters in Abuja. He said the recent report by the International
Huma Rights Watch which indicted the security agents, necessitated an
investigation by the police which found some of the officers culpable.
“About three or four weeks ago, I established a panel to investigate
some allegations made by the Human Rights Watch. Investigation was
conducted by the IGPs Monitoring Team at the Force Headquarters and they
made contact with the Human Rights Watch in order for them to help us
verify some of the allegations but, according to the response we got,
they said they don’t reveal their sources of information. Despite that,
our officers, with much tenacity and professionalism, were able to
unearth some of the allegations and we have so far arrested some
suspects. Some of these suspects are police officers, some are from
sister agencies while some are civilians. As I am talking to you, we
have two police officers under investigation and they are in detention
now. We have a prison warden, two civilian JTF, a civilian from the
Ministry of Agriculture, Maiduguri who is now in our detention. In
respect of our sister agency, we have written to them for them to avail
us some of their personnel. These sister agencies, we are expecting
three; obviously from the Army, and one from Airforce. Those are the
people presently subjected to investigation. We know that it is an
unfortunate incident that happened in most of these IDP camps and we are
putting a lot of measures in place to address some of these issues.
We have deployed a lot of women police officers in the camps in Borno,
Adamawa and Yobe state and we are going into partnership with the United
States to see how we can enhance the training of our personnel who we
are going to attach to some of these IDPs. As usual, those in the
police and the military, as a procedure, we are going to dismiss them
first before we take them to court but I am assuring that they will be
taken to court to answer for this criminal act which they conducted.”he
said
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