Tobias Sylvester
Some soldiers from the Nigerian Air Force have been accused of brutalizing and killing two residents of Mabera, Sokoto State.
According to eye-witnesses identified as Sani Mabera, the incident occurred on Sunday night around 8:30 pm, when a lady, said to be the girlfriend of an officer, was allegedly insulted by youths in the neighborhood.
Provoked by the youths’ behaviour, the lady reported the matter to her officer boyfriend, who deployed a truckload of air craftsmen to deal with the culprits.
Following the arrival of the soldier to the neighborhood, they started shooting sporadically and then asked their colleague’s girlfriend to point at those who insulted her.
When she failed to identify the real culprits, the operatives meted out frog jump punishment on everyone.
Those who ran away were shot. At least five people sustained gunshot injuries while two people died.
The two people who died have been identified as a student, Abdulsalam Lawan and a 40-year-old mother of seven, Maryam Abdulrahman.
The witness said the soldiers trailed Abdulsalam Lawan, who fled the punishment scenes to a nearby house, and killed him along with the mother of seven, Maryam Abdulrahman.
The bodies of the victims have been deposited at Specialist Hospital, Sokoto for autopsy.
The spokesman for the Nigerian Air Force, NAF, Ibikunle Daramola, neither answered a telephone call nor replied to a text message seeking their response to the killings.
KanyiDaily had also reported that four students of Nassarawa State University were shot by security operatives during a protest over water scarcity in the institution.
The victims were among the hundreds of students who protested against the scarcity of electricity and water in the school. During the protest, some soldiers invaded the school and started firing shots which left four students dead, a witness said.
