Nigeria’s federal police force kills with impunity, extorts those it’s charged to protect and rapes arrested prostitutes as a “fringe benefit” of the job, a report released on Monday by a civil liberties group alleges.
The Open Society Justice Initiative’s report is the latest stain on Nigeria’s corrupt and maligned police force, which at its mildest merely demands bribes from motorists at roadblocks. At its worst, the report alleges the police rub chemical mace and hot chili pepper into the genitals of those it arrests, drawing out dubious confessions officers use an excuse to summarily execute those they describe as “armed robbers.”
“The average police officer on the streets of Nigeria is armed with horse whip and many of them show considerable enthusiasm in using it on innocent passers-by without provocation,” the report from the Abuja, Nigeria-based organization reads. “Those who get away with merely being horsewhipped are considered lucky. Many others fare much worse.”
Police spokesman Emmanuel Ojukwu declined to immediately comment on the report on Monday, saying he had not yet read it. However, he told The Associated Press in December that “extrajudicial killing is not approved in Nigeria” and that officers suspected of such killings are brought to justice.
The report draws a different conclusion. The group, supported by liberal financier George Soros’ foundation, said it based its findings on field monitoring and investigation at more than 400 police stations and posts visited from February 2007 to January last year.
The group found police openly paraded alleged armed robbery suspects before local journalists before later executing them. The police used euphemisms for the slayings, saying the suspects would be “escorted,” sent out on an “errand” or “transferred to” the capital Abuja, the report claims.
The report alleges officers called the soon-to-be dead “rams” or “bush meat.” Their investigations typically employed torture to draw out confessions. The officers drove nails into suspect’s hands or heads, shoved pins into the genitals or hung suspects upside down in a method referred to as “suicide,” the report claims.
Asked about suspects’ rights, the report says one officer in Adamawa State said: “We have seen pastors, imams, and highly placed and respected citizens who are pure criminals, pure criminals! And you people say they are innocent?”
Officers also used nightly prostitute roundups as a means to barter sex from those who couldn’t pay as little as US$6 for their release, the report claims. The report describes officers even raping women who came to report crimes at police stations.
Allegations of brutality are nothing new for Nigeria’s police force, which is controlled from the federal level. In December, an Amnesty International report alleged that police kill hundreds of people in so-called extrajudicial slayings each year with few consequences.
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