The Director, Defence Information, Nigerian Army, Major-General Jimmy Akpor says efforts by Reuters, an international news agency, to blackmail the country’s Military through Mercenary journalism has failed.
In a statement, General Akpor said the Reuters report had alleged that since 2013, Nigeria’s military had run a secret, systematic and illegal abortion programme in the North East, terminating at least 12,000 pregnancies among women and girls.
According to Reuters, their sources alleged that many children were shot, poisoned, suffocated or run down by vehicles in army-led actions.
The army statement said the Reuters report was to allege that “soldiers selected babies and toddlers for killing after rescuing them and their mothers from Islamist militants”, amongst other weighty allegations.
General Akpor condemned the allegations, insisting that the Nigerian military “has never and would never” target children during its counterinsurgency operations or other operations, both within and outside Nigeria.
He said the “fictitious series of stories constitute a body of insults on the Nigerian peoples and culture”, as no people or culture in Nigeria practice such evil as “allegedly concocted by the Reuters team”.
General Akpor stressed that there have been no cases of infanticide anywhere the Nigerian military has operated, such as in Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Darfur, Sudan, Gambia and Guinea Bissau among others.
General Akpor explained that from July 2021 till November 2022, a total of 82,064 Boko Haram fighters, alongside members of their families, have surrendered to troops of Operation HADIN KAI. Of that number, he continued, 16,553 were active male fighters, 24,446 were women while 41,065 were children who are still with their parents in the various rehabilitation centers.
RN
