Hundreds of women comprising of widows, orphans and aged women trooped out on Monday to demand information on the whereabouts of their loved ones who were arrested and detained in the Giwa Barracks’ Army detention facility in Maiduguri in connection with Boko Haram’s attack of the facility in 2014.
They displayed placards with different inscriptions asking the military to make public a list of names with dates of arrest and location of detention of the people arrested during the peak of the insurgency in Borno and the North East in general.
The women were commemorating the eighth year of the Boko Haram attack of Giwa Barracks’ detention centre where some of the insurgents were being detained.
The attack happened on March 14, 2014.
The leader of the group, Hamsatu Allamin, accused the military of wrongfully detaining over 30,000 men and young boys, including women for over eight years while releasing and reintegrating the real Boko Haram fighters on the premise of repentance.
She said although about 3,000 persons have been released in the past one year, over 20,000 others are still in detention without them being charged to court and for no reason.
She said, “About 3,000 detainees have been released here in Maiduguri within one year and a half among who are 450 sons and husbands of our widows and aged women.
“But there are still 20,000 others still in detention. We, as families of these detainees, will never relent in asking questions about the whereabouts of our sons and husbands until we get answers.
“Hundreds of thousands of young men and boys have been arrested by the military within Maiduguri since 2011 allegedly for being members of Boko Haram.
“While we, the relatives, don’t know their whereabouts, we do know that most of them were taken to Giwa Barracks’ military detention facility in Maiduguri. Most of them have gone missing or feared dead since the military arrested them at the height of the fight against Boko Haram.”
Source: The Punch