HURIWA, the Nigerian Human Rights Writers Association, has warned that no one is safe if Muslims can accuse one of their own of blasphemy, lynch and burn him in broad daylight.
All of this occurred without the assistance of the police, according to the organization, implying that Nigerian policing had completely failed.
Due to a lack of professionalism and leadership, the Nigeria Police Force’s response time to violent situations is uncertain, according to HURIWA.
This comes after a horrible incident on Saturday in which Ahmad Usman, a 30-year-old member of a local vigilante group, was slain in Lugbe, Airport Rd, Abuja, for allegedly insulting Islam. The killing was also termed as crude by HURIWA.
The event at the Federal Housing Estates in Lugbe, Abuja, is the second in recent months in which Islamic extremists have slain people accused of blasphemy or suspected to have committed blasphemy in Abuja, according to HURIWA.
According to the report, these heinous acts demonstrate that President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration is tolerant of Islamic extremism because it lacks the resources and political will to act decisively to apprehend those who murdered many Nigerians on similar fabricated charges by mobs, and the killers were allowed to roam free.
According to HURIWA, the Federal Government has a frightening practice of living with mass murderers, terrorists, and kidnappers under the current administration.
It claimed that in the previous seven years, there have been an overwhelming number of killings committed beneath the noses of Buhari’s government that have gone uninvestigated, with no known steps taken to bring the culprits to justice, such as sending them to firing squads.
Mrs. Eunice Elisha, a Redeemed Christian Church of God pastor, was hacked to death by suspected Muslim fanatics while giving an early morning preaching in the Gbazango neighborhood of Kubwa, Abuja, in the first of two assassinations by Islamic extremists in Abuja.
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The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and the Catholic Bishops of Nigeria (CBCN) were also blamed by the organization for failing to speak out and maintain a moral stance in the face of Islamists’ serial murders of Christians. According to the report, Christian leaders just issued flimsy remarks full of immaturity and terror, and then went to sleep, while Christian deaths continued unabated.
The incident, CAN stated in its first public response, was “yet another religious, hatred-motivated brutal murder” that was becoming more common under Muhammadu Buhari’s administration.
“Discrimination against non-Muslims in Nigeria under the Buhari Administration has taken on a hazardous dimension that should not be left to the vagaries of time and circumstance to settle,” the group said.
HURIWA also condemned Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, who is also a pastor of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, for doing nothing to stop the horrible murder of Mrs. Elisha, a female preacher from his church.
The fact that the latest victim of Islamist assassination was a Moslem is irrelevant, according to the rights group, because it demonstrates that the Federal Government, under Buhari, is complicit in all religiously motivated hate crimes by failing to take administrative, security, or operational measures to apprehend and prosecute the perpetrators.
Despite the fact that the victim of the recent mad mob action in Abuja was a Moslem like his attackers, HURIWA believes that anybody may be framed and publicly murdered, and that the Nigerian police can only come after the crime has been performed and the assassins had dispersed on their own.
HURIWA recalled that while the most recent avoidable incident, which occurred at the Lugbe timber market section of the Fruit Market in Federal Housing Estates in Lugbe Abuja, involved a Moslem, the person killed was a Nigerian citizen with all of his constitutionally guaranteed fundamental human rights, and the government failed in its legal obligation to protect the citizen.
It also faulted the police for failing to act quickly to prevent the crime from occurring rather than waiting for armed Islamists to kill the civilian before inciting a rush as police fired rounds to disperse the crowd.
“Nigeria police have no capabilities in responding quickly to crises and incidences of crime,” HURIWA noted, “but they sometimes arrive hours after the incidents and begin harassing witnesses who may be completely innocent.” This policing strategy of responding to crimes after they have occurred demonstrates the collapse of policing in Nigeria, which necessitates immediate action to revive, reform, and restructure policing institutions in Nigeria, including the Department of State Services, because because the government is deliberately inactive, anyone can become a victim tomorrow.”
“It’s appalling that the police did nothing and allowed the mob action to happen about 1 p.m. on Saturday after Usman took safety in the market’s vigilante office. The local security force was overpowered, according to the findings, before Usman was slain in front of the office and his corpse set on fire. Despite the fact that the police were not physically there to prevent this, the cops were able to come up with the amusing statistic that the mob numbered more than 200 persons. Is the Nigerian Police Force now a unit of the National Population Commission, to the point where they abandoned their law enforcement and crime-prevention duties to conduct a head count of the killers of the blasphemy execution victim in Abuja over the weekend and failed to apprehend even one of the 200 people counted? If he (Usman) was discovered shopping for food at the afternoon market. Why did the police not respond much sooner and earlier in the morning when the blasphemy occurred and a stick was used to beat him in the head, or do the police lack Intelligence collecting skills? He was stoned only after that before rushing into the workplace. Due to the large number of people chasing him, his coworkers were unable to protect him, and after he became unconscious, petrol was poured on him and he was burned in front of the office, and only then did people witness the arrival of police officers after the heinous crime had been committed, and the Federal Government will not sanction the police chief in the FCT for dereliction of duty because the current government appears to be pro-Islamic extremists.”
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HURIWA reported that on May 12, a mob in Sokoto gruesomely murdered Deborah Samuel, a female student at Shagari College of Education, and set her body on fire after she was accused of blasphemy against Prophet Muhammed in a message on the school’s Whatsapp group, with the perpetrators still at large.
The rights group demanded that the President take steps to ensure that the perpetrators of this and other crimes of a mass execution by Islamists are apprehended, prosecuted, and punished, just as the FCT’s police claim that normalcy has been restored following the brutal murder of a citizen in Lugbe was dismissed by the rights group. Normalcy can only be restored when the killers are identified, convicted, and perhaps sentenced to death for their crimes against humanity, and when the police become professional and respond quickly to crime situations, according to the report.
