IPOB Killings: Group demands prosecution of Buratai, Arase, others

The International Criminal Court of Justice has been asked to issue warrants of arrest on Nigeria’s Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Tukur Bu­rutai and the Inspector-General of Police, Mr. Solomon Arase for their roles in the alleged cold-blooded murder of over 80 members of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) from November 2015 to date.
A pro-democracy and human rights group, International Soci­ety for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety), which made the demand also wants the Commander of 302 Onitsha Military Cantonment, Col. Is­sah Abdullahi and the Anambra State Commissioner of Police, Hosea Karma, among others similarly arrested.
In a statement made available to the AUTHORITY on Sunday yesterday in Onitsha, the group also asked the international community to conduct investi­gations into the dastardly acts of “butchering unarmed members of the Indigenous People of Bi­afra (IPOB)”.

It said, “The Buhari adminis­tration must stop the on-going ethnic cleansing and mass mur­der of unarmed and non-violent members of Igbo ethnic group in Nigeria and refrain from pushing the innocent race to the wall”.
Intersociety in the statement signed by its Chairman, Board of Trustees (BoT), Emeka Umeag­balasi, called on the internation­al community, local and interna­tional human rights and media groups to mount and sustain intensive pressures on the au­thorities of the Nigerian Army and Onitsha Military Canton­ment in particular to disclose where they dumped the corpses of other IPOB/pro-biafran activ­ists, allegedly abducted, shot and murdered alongside late citizens Michael Nweke, Peter Chuk­wuma Nwankwo and Matthew Kanu on December 17, 2015 at Onitsha Niger Bridgehead.
“We also demand for the im­mediate and unconditional re­lease of Citizen Nnamdi Kanu and others standing Kangaroo trials and political persecutions with him as well as 20 IPOB of­ficials and members dumped at Umuahia prisons before and since February 9, 2016”, the group said.
Intersociety declared that the continued detention of women, particularly nursing mothers among them, amounted to a serious affront to the principles and purposes of the United Na­tions as well as the basic stan­dards of the international law and humanitarian principles.