Nigeria’s military acknowledged on Sunday that raids in pursuit of an alleged gang leader in the main oil-producing region may have killed civilians, but insisted that only militants were targeted.
The acknowledgement came as those among about 500 people who took refuge in a warehouse after claiming to have fled the village where Wednesday’s operation took place said their relatives were killed by military fire.
“It is possible that one or two or three of those who may have been killed could have been civilians,” said Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Antigha, a spokesman for the task force that carried out the raids.
“There wasn’t 100 percent evacuation [of the village beforehand]. It is possible that among those who were not evacuated could have been civilians caught up,” he said.
Death tolls have varied widely following the raids in Ayakoromo village in the Niger Delta region. Amnesty International said it had received reports of scores killed.
Houses were also burned, but the military said they were not set ablaze intentionally.
Some 500 people had taken refuge in a warehouse on the outskirts of the oil city of Warri and claimed to have fled the village because of the military operation.
One woman said her brother, a Catholic church leader, was among those killed by the military.
“He was shot inside his house,” Stella Oteigba, 55, said. “His body was badly burned.”
“We are appealing to the Nigerian government to stop this madness,” said Garry Stanley, who said he was a former local government official. “We also want them to provide relief materials to the people who have been here for the past four days. Right now our village is under military occupation. Nobody can go back there.”
An activist who visited Ayakoromo on Friday accompanied by the military has said at least nine people were reported killed and dozens of houses were damaged, including some that were burnt.
The raids targeted John Togo, who authorities say is a leader of a criminal gang responsible for piracy, robberies and rape.
Meanwhile, the Niger Delta Liberation Force said yesterday it ruptured an oil pipeline belonging to the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corp.
The attack on the pipeline at Batan in Nigeria Delta state took place on Sunday night.
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS