Police Officers and Soldiers Arrested for sexually assaulting IDPs

Some soldiers, police officers, men of the Nigeria Air Force, have been arrested for sexually assaultingfemale Internally Displaced persons in various camps. The Inspector General of Police, Idris Ibrahim, disclosed this yesterday while speaking with some senior officers at the Force Headquarters in Abuja. He said the recent report by the International Huma Rights Watch which indicted the security agents, necessitated an investigation by the police which found some of the officers culpable.
     “About three or four weeks ago, I established a panelto investigate some allegations made by the Human Rights Watch. Investigation was conducted by the IGPs Monitoring Team at the Force Headquarters and they made contact with the Human Rights Watch in order for them to help us verify some of the allegations but, according to the response we got, they said they don’t reveal their sources of information. Despite that, our officers, with much tenacity and professionalism, were able to unearth some of the allegations and we have so far arrested some suspects. Some of these suspects are police officers, some are from sister agencies while some are civilians. As I am talking to you, we have two police officers under investigation and they are in detention now. We have a prison warden, two civilian JTF, a civilian from the Ministry of Agriculture, Maiduguri who is now in our detention. In respect of our sister agency, we have written to them for them to avail us some of their personnel. These sister agencies, we are expecting three; obviously from the Army, and one from Airforce. Those are the people presently subjected to investigation. We know that it is an unfortunate incident that happened in most of these IDP camps and we are putting a lot of measures in place to address some of these issues. We have deployed a lot of women police officers in the camps in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe state and we are going into partnership with the United States to see how we can enhance the training of our personnel who we are going to attach to some of these IDPs. As usual, those in the police and the military, as a procedure, we are going to dismiss them first before we take them to court but I am assuring that they will be taken to court to answer for this criminal act which they conducted.”he said