Abuja: Another 45 Shi’a Protesters Shot Dead
Three years after Zaria, the same security institution again confronted members of the same movement, and at least 45 people died. The Army then posted a video of a foreign president saying that rocks should be treated as rifles.
Members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria marched in and around Abuja in late October 2018 to demand the release of their detained leader. Amnesty International published its findings on October 31 and concluded that excessive force by soldiers and police had killed at least 45 people over two days, with at least 39 of them on October 29 and more than 120 injured [Documented]. Its investigators worked from medical observation, witness interviews, photographs, and video analysis. The Army stated that six people had been killed and that its soldiers had been attacked first [Alleged].
On November 2, 2018, the official Twitter account of the Nigerian Army posted a video of United States President Donald Trump telling reporters that soldiers should treat rocks thrown at them as rifles, captioned with an instruction to watch and draw deductions [Documented]. Brigadier General John Agim, then Director of Defence Information, told AFP that the video had been posted in reaction to the Amnesty International report. The post was deleted after criticism.
An institution defending lawful conduct produces its rules of engagement, its casualty returns, and the findings of its board of inquiry. The Nigerian Army produced a foreign politician’s remarks about a different continent, then withdrew them [Inference].
The two reported counts differ sharply. Amnesty documented at least 45 deaths and the Army stated six, a difference of thirty-nine people [Documented]. The Islamic Movement put the figure near fifty [Alleged]. Brigadier General Agim maintained that demonstrators had carried petrol bombs, machetes and knives and were therefore armed. Weapons carried by some members of a crowd may justify only force that is necessary and proportionate to an imminent threat, and never lethal force as a matter of course. They do not convert an entire assembly into a lawful target, which is the distinction section 33(2) of the Constitution draws through the words reasonably necessary [Inference].
Human Rights Watch set out the sequence of that week. Soldiers fired into a gathering at Zuba on October 27, leaving at least six dead. At a military checkpoint at Karu on October 29 soldiers shot at a religious procession, killing at least twenty-one. On October 30 police used teargas and live ammunition to halt a procession into the Abuja city centre and arrested 400 members of the movement, of whom 120 were charged [Documented].
Detention capacity was therefore mobilized in the same week and in the same city as the shootings. That does not establish which nonlethal options were available at each earlier confrontation, and it is a fact any inquiry into proportionality would have to weigh [Inference].
Notice, and what it means in law
Recurrence is what gives this installment its legal weight, and the notices delivered between the two incidents are documented and dated. Amnesty International wrote to Buratai as Chief of Army Staff on April 12, 2016 about deaths in military detention and received a reply on April 20 directing it elsewhere [Documented]. The Kaduna commission reported in July 2016 that the Army had used excessive and disproportionate force at Zaria and recommended prosecution. The United States Department of State records that Kaduna State accepted that recommendation in a White Paper in December 2016. The White Paper was not retrieved in primary form for this review, so the acceptance is attributed to the State Department account and not restated as independently verified.
Plate 11. The thirty-four months between Zaria and Abuja: three documented notices and one intervening statutory change.
These materials support an argument that the office was on notice, and they do not by themselves establish command responsibility. Article 28 of the Rome Statute states the international standard. It requires effective command and control, knowledge or constructive knowledge, the material ability to prevent or repress, and a failure to take necessary and reasonable measures or to submit the matter to competent authorities. Personal receipt, effective control over the units concerned, and material ability to act are separate elements requiring separate proof [Inference].
Notice nevertheless bears on the element it touches. A letter addressed to the Chief of Army Staff and answered from that office, a state judicial commission reporting in public, and a state government publishing its acceptance of a prosecution recommendation are together capable of supporting an inference that the relevant knowledge existed [Inference]. No court-martial convened between December 2015 and October 2018 in connection with the Zaria killings, no revised public-order rules of engagement, and no sanction against any officer was located, and a nonpublic disciplinary record may exist beyond the reach of this review [Documented + Inference].
The deleted post has an evidentiary character separate from its offensiveness. A post on the Nigerian Army’s official account is an institutional communication issued through an official channel, and the Director of Defence Information publicly explained it as the Army’s answer to a specific human-rights finding [Documented]. The post evidences the institution’s public justification at the time and does not by itself establish the rules of engagement then in force, and its subsequent deletion does not unmake the statement [Inference]. Archived copies and the contemporaneous reporting of Agence France-Presse, ABC News, CNN, Al Jazeera, the Washington Post and Human Rights Watch preserve both the post and the official explanation for it.
The line the Constitution draws
Nigeria’s Anti-Torture Act commenced on 20 December 2017, a date recorded in the Federal Government’s own communication to the United Nations, and its arrival between the two incidents governs every charging decision that follows [Documented]. Conduct in October 2018 may fall within its reach if the statutory elements are proved. Conduct at Zaria in December 2015, at Giwa Barracks in 2016, and at the pro-Biafra gatherings cannot, because section 36(8) of the Constitution bars conviction for an act that was not an offense when it occurred and section 36(12) requires that an offense be defined and its penalty prescribed in a written law.
Commencement opens a gateway; it does not supply a charge. A shooting after 20 December 2017 does not become torture by operation of the calendar, and a prosecutor must still prove the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering, the statutory purpose, the involvement of a public official, and the personal participation, instigation, consent or acquiescence of the accused [Inference]. Where those elements are absent, culpable homicide may remain available, depending on the evidence and the applicable section.
Plate 12. Which conduct the Anti-Torture Act reaches, which it cannot, and what remains available on both sides of the line.
Retroactivity is the first objection any competent defense raises, and a charge framed under a 2017 statute for conduct in 2015 fails at arraignment on a point the prosecution could have avoided by choosing the right instrument [Inference]. Culpable homicide under section 221 of the Penal Code was available in 2015 and no limitation provision barring its prosecution was located in this review [Documented + Inference].
Abuja sits in the Federal Capital Territory, which is not a state and which applies the Penal Code, so the territorial criminal-law charge for the October 2018 deaths is the same section 221 that governs Zaria. The Anti-Torture Act stands alongside it and, where its elements are established, reaches well beyond the person who fired. Section 8 of the gazetted Act governs liability. A participant in the infliction of torture, or a person present at its commission, is liable as a principal. A superior officer who issues the order is equally liable as a principal. Under section 8(4) the immediate commanding officer of the unit concerned is liable as an accessory for any act, omission or negligence on his part that led to the commission of torture by his subordinates.
Two further provisions complete the scheme. The Act removes superior orders as a justification, so an officer cannot answer a charge by pointing upward. Section 9 provides imprisonment for a term not exceeding twenty-five years. Where torture results in death, the conduct is treated as murder and tried and punished under the relevant law.
Section 8(4) matters to this series because it states a domestic rule of superior liability without recourse to any treaty Nigeria has not domesticated [Inference]. It is narrower than a command-responsibility regime. It reaches the immediate commanding officer of the unit, and only through his own participation, omission or negligence leading to torture by his subordinates. It imposes no liability on the Chief of Army Staff by title, and liability at that level would require proof under another applicable provision. Within those limits it is the sharpest instrument in Nigerian law for the conduct this file examines.
Numbering requires care with this statute. Widely circulated online copies reproduce the numbering of the bill, in which liability appears at section 7 and penalties at section 8. The gazetted Act renumbers those provisions as sections 8 and 9, and every citation in this file follows the gazetted text [Documented].
No charge against any soldier arising from those killings was located in this review [Documented + Inference].
A Presidential Investigation Panel on allegations of human-rights violations by the armed forces sat during 2017 and submitted its report in February 2018, eight months before the Abuja shootings. It cannot therefore be described as a body that examined Abuja and failed. What it establishes is earlier and narrower: the Presidency had constituted a national inquiry into the conduct of the armed forces, and that inquiry had reported, before October 2018 [Documented]. Its report and the government response to it were not retrieved for this review, so no conclusion is drawn here about what it recommended [Documented + Inference].
What three years established
Two mass-casualty incidents involving the same security institution and members of the same movement, separated by thirty-four months, with three documented notices and one statutory change in between, and no disciplinary or criminal proceeding located as arising from either. That sequence is the evidentiary core of the command-responsibility question this series takes up in Volume II [Inference].
Volume I closes here, and the record it leaves is narrow enough to state in a sentence. Between December 2015 and October 2020, deaths were recorded at Zaria, at Onitsha and Nkpor, at Aba, at Giwa Barracks, in Abuja, and at the Lekki toll gate, and 347 of the Zaria dead were subsequently buried at Mando. Four bodies examined one or more of those incidents and made findings: the Kaduna State Judicial Commission of Inquiry in July 2016, Amnesty International across 2016 to 2020, Human Rights Watch in December 2018, and the Lagos State Judicial Panel of Inquiry in November 2021. A state government then accepted a recommendation to prosecute the soldiers responsible. The only prosecutions located as arising from any of it ran against 177 members of the movement whose dead filled the Mando grave, charged over the killing of the one soldier who died at Zaria [Documented + Inference].
Evidence Docket
DOCUMENTARY RECORD
Amnesty International. (2018). Nigeria: Security forces must be held accountable for killing of at least 45 peaceful Shi’a protesters.
Human Rights Watch. (2018). Trump’s incendiary rhetoric emboldens Nigerian military.
Human Rights Watch. (2018). Nigeria: End impunity for killings of Shia.
Agence France-Presse. (2018, November 2). Nigerian army posts Trump video to justify shooting Shiites. The Globe Post.
Al Jazeera. (2018, November 2). Nigerian army posts Trump video to justify deadly fire.
Busari, S. (2018, November 2). Nigerian army appears to use Trump’s words to defend shooting of protesters. CNN.
Noack, R. (2018, November 2). Nigeria’s army cited Trump’s remarks to justify opening fire on protesters, then deleted the tweet. The Washington Post.
Kaduna State Government. (2016, December). White paper on the report of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into the Zaria clashes. Terms recorded in United States Department of State (2017, 2019).
Winsor, M. (2018, November 3). Nigerian Army appears to use Trump’s words to defend its killing of rock-throwing protesters. ABC News.
United States Department of State. (2019). Nigeria 2018 human rights report.
Amnesty International. (2016, May 11). Nigeria: Correspondence to the Chief of Army Staff on deaths in military detention, 12 April 2016, and the Nigerian Army response of 20 April 2016, recorded in Nigeria: If you see it, you will cry: Life and death in Giwa barracks.
INTERNATIONAL AND REGIONAL STANDARDS
Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, ratified by Nigeria on June 28, 2001.
Permanent Mission of Nigeria to the United Nations Office at Geneva. (2025, January 20). Note verbale recording the commencement of the Anti-Torture Act on December 20, 2017.
RECORDS NOT RETRIEVED
Presidential Investigation Panel to Review Compliance of the Armed Forces with Human Rights Obligations and Rules of Engagement (inaugurated August 2017). Report submitted to the President in February 2018. Neither the report nor the government response was retrieved for this review, and no finding of that panel is relied on here.
Kaduna State Government. (2016, December). White paper on the report of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into the Zaria clashes. Not retrieved in primary form; its terms are taken from United States Department of State (2017).
PRIMARY AUTHORITIES
Anti-Torture Act 2017 (gazetted text), ss. 8 (liability), 8(4) (immediate commanding officer), 9 (penalties). Online copies reproducing the bill number these as ss. 7 and 8.
Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended), ss. 33, 36(8), 36(12).
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, art. 28 (as an interpretive standard; not domesticated in Nigeria).
Penal Code, Cap P3, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004, ss. 221, 222.
Right of reply: this file operates a standing reply channel. No advance notice is dispatched to named parties. The channel is published with the work and remains open for as long as this entry stands on the register. The Nigerian Army, the Directorate of Defence Information, the Nigeria Police Force, and Lieutenant General Tukur Yusufu Buratai (retd.) may respond to any matter reported in this installment. Responses may be sent to [email protected] and will be published in full alongside it, with any disputed fact identified as disputed at the point where it appears.
