By Joseph Otteh & Rita Patrick

On Sunday March 30, 2014, about 21 persons suspected of belonging to the Boko Haram sect were killed and many others wounded during the a reported jailbreak at the Asokoro headquarters of the Department of State Security in Abuja.

The official account of the incident as reported in the media is that a detainee struck an operative who had brought breakfast, with his handcuff. The report did not say whether the handcuff had been locked around the detainee’s wrist or had been unlocked.  It did not say the extent to which the actions of the detainee threatened the life or safety of the operative, and whether the detainee succeeded in dispossessing the operative of his weapon if s/he carried one.

The statement further said that bullets were fired at the detainee, but did not say what other detainees did to deserve being fired at or killed. Some media reports quote Ms. Marilyn Ogar, Deputy Director, Public Relations, of the State Security Service, Ms. Marilyn Ogar as saying that “… the attempt by the detainee to escape made other SSS operatives on guard to fire shots to prevent others from escaping.”

A literal interpretation of this statement is that other detainees who posed no danger to the DSS or its operatives, or, who, in fact made no attempts to escape from detention were fired at to prevent them from even contemplating the possibility of fleeing! Is this what happened? Preventive shooting, or, actually, preventive killing!

No clear justification has been provided by the DSS or the Nigerian State for the killing of such a multitude of vulnerable detainees. We pose many questions to the SSS: Where were the detainees when they were fired at? Outside of their enclosures or within? Within the precincts of the DSS facility or outside? At what point were they fired at, and with what purpose? To restrain their flight or to annihilate them? Then, who fired at them? The DSS/SSS or the soldiers who came to assist them? Were they fired at to avoid political embarrassment? Did they all die immediately after the shooting or were injured persons given medical assistance? There has been no clear, forthright, convincing and consistent statement from the DSS, SSS or government to justify this massacre.

Anyone associated with the Boko Haram sect would ordinarily face considerable public prejudice given the horrifying atrocities attributed to the group; yet, it is this negative perception that renders both them (as well as those wrongly associated with them) so vulnerable to persecution, to being silenced, brutalized or violated capriciously. The death of anyone associated with this sect must be subject to the toughest scrutiny to avoid people getting away with clear homicides only by the sheer unpopularity of the victims’ ascribed label. And yes: Nigerian law enforcement and security agencies do understand how to leverage on unpopular stereotypes and how little sympathies exist for people associated – truthfully or falsely – to reviled groups.

We see this every time, every where. They abound with the Police routinely saying those they extrajudicially killed were armed robbers who were trying to flee from the law, and to refresh our memory with a notorious piece of history, we recall the Apo 6. We see the Joint Task Force (JTF) saying that those it killed in Baga, Maiduguri last year were terrorists, when it fired indiscriminately at unarmed civilians in revenge for the killing of an Army Lieutenant or Lance Corporal. Our security forces, overwhelmed by the escalating affront of extremist groups are, no doubt, under pressure, and have repeatedly acted with impunity and committed grave crimes against many innocent people, in a largely unchallenged way.

Reports of extrajudicial, summary executions by government forces are clearly intensifying and, to some extent, delegitimizing what ought to be a credible fight against terrorism.