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This 26-year-old man says he had acid sprayed on him on Biafra Remembrance Day in Onitsha.
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This 26-year-old man (name withheld) was a rally when he was shot and then hid from security
forces in a gutter.He said that when soldiers found him they poured acid on him.
"I
covered my face. I would have been blind by now," he told Amnesty
International. "He poured acid on my hands. My hands and body started
burning. The flesh was burning... They dragged me out of the gutter.
They said I'll die slowly."
The report acknowledges that some protesters threw stones, burned tires and in at least one incident, shot at police.
"These acts of violence and disorder did not justify the level of force used against the whole assembly," the report reads.
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| Pro-Biafran protestors gather in Onitsha, Nigeria on May 30 2016. |
Nigerian
security forces have killed at least 150 people in a series of attacks
against the largely peaceful pro-Biafra secessionist movement, according to a report by Amnesty International.
The
report finds "overwhelming evidence that Nigerian security forces
committed gross human rights violations" at a number of public
gatherings in the country's southern region since August 2015.
In
what the human rights group calls "a chilling campaign," security
forces were apparently responsible for the extrajudicial killings,
detentions, and torture of supporters of the Indigenous People of Biafra
(IPOB), a group that is pushing for an independent Biafran state in
Nigeria's oil-rich southeast.
"This
deadly repression of pro-Biafra activists is further stoking tensions
in the southeast of Nigeria," said Makmid Kamara, Interim Director of Amnesty International Nigeria.
"This
reckless and trigger-happy approach to crowd control has caused at
least 150 deaths and we fear the actual total might be far higher,"
Kamara said.
Government response
Nigerian
military spokesman Colonel Sani Usman said: "We wish to debunk the
insinuation that our troops perpetrated the killing of defenseless
agitators.
This is an outright
attempt to tarnish the reputation of the security forces in general and
the Nigerian Army in particular, for whatever inexplicable parochial
reasons.
"For umpteenth times, the
Nigerian Army has informed the public about the heinous intent of this
Non-Governmental Organisation," Usman added, "which is never relenting
in dabbling into our national security in manners that obliterate
objectivity, fairness and simple logic."
The Biafra call for independence
The
Biafra movement calls for an independent state in the majority Igbo
region in Nigeria's oil producing southeast. Supporters of the
independence movement claim the region has been marginalized from
government participation and development.
The
Igbo are one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa's most populous
nation, and their historical grievances carry over after the Nigerian
Civil War, which started in 1967 and was largely fought to repress the
Igbo secessionist movement. The Igbo lost the war, which ended in 1970.
For more than a year the IPOB have been staging a series of rallies seeking the establishment of a Biafran state.
Protests intensified in October 2015 when Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the IPOB, was arrested. He remains in detention.
culled from CNN