The Pattern: What the Register Shows
Four alleged-force incidents and one later recovery event, two states, twenty-one months, and no publicly located charge. The register is what a prosecutor would test. What it cannot yet supply is the operational record that could turn recurrence into proof of policy.
The working register is coded across eight fields: date and location, responsible agency or unit where documented, victims and reported casualties, conduct alleged, primary source, corroborating source, government response, and any investigation or prosecution located, with its own evidentiary classification. Plate 17 presents an abridged five-field display of that coding. An entry that cannot fill the eight does not enter, which keeps the register smaller than the record probably is and keeps every line in it answerable.
That coding divides into four alleged-force incidents and one subsequent recovery event, and the distinction matters. A recovery of bodies is not a use of force, and treating it as one would assert a causal connection that no examination has established [Inference].
Plate 17. Four alleged-force incidents and one subsequent recovery event across Abia and Anambra States between December 2015 and September 2017, with the reported casualties and publicly located prosecution record for each entry.
What the register holds
Two figures sit above the register and are not entries in it. Across the year to August 2016, Amnesty International documented at least 150 killings of pro-Biafra demonstrators and supporters by security forces. At least 60 of those deaths occurred around Biafra Remembrance Day on 30 May 2016, and that 60 is a subset of the 150 and not an addition to it [Documented].
Plate 17 holds five dated entries that can be located and sourced individually: four alleged-force incidents and one subsequent recovery event. Some of them fall within the 150 and some are not shown to. Where the relationship between an entry and the aggregate is not established, the entry says so and implies no total [Inference].
Aba supplies the sharpest single sequence in the file. The military surrounded a gathering at Aba National High School on 9 February 2016 and fired live ammunition without prior warning. Eyewitnesses and local human rights workers reported that many of those present were rounded up and taken away. On 13 February, thirteen bodies were recovered from a pit near the Aba highway, and witnesses identified some of them as men reportedly taken away by the military [Documented].
Nkpor followed three months later. Ahead of a planned march from the Nkpor motor park on the night of 29 May 2016, a joint operation by the army, police and navy moved through the area, and supporters told Amnesty International that hundreds of people were asleep in St Edmund’s Catholic Church when soldiers entered the compound. Shootings followed at three locations in Onitsha over 29 and 30 May [Documented].
Python Dance II followed in September 2017, and Part 1 sets out what happened on the Aba–Umuahia road. The register therefore holds five dated entries across two named states, Abia and Anambra, over twenty-one months from December 2015 to September 2017, of which four concern alleged uses of force and one concerns the recovery at the Aba pit.
The earliest entry is the Onitsha shooting of 17 December 2015, in which Amnesty International reported that the military killed five people. Its investigation drew on video and photographic material, interviews with witnesses, victims and relatives, and analysis of the sites concerned. It documented at least five similar incidents in Onitsha alone from August 2015 [Documented].
Aba is the most consequential single item in the register, because the recovery generated physical evidence capable of testing identification and causation. Recovery, examination, identification and cause of death are all determinable from remains. Whether that work was done, and by whom, is not shown by the retrieved record [Documented + Inference].
Nkpor raises a distinct legal question. A church compound in which people are sleeping is not a site of confrontation, and there is no crowd to disperse, no line to hold and no advancing threat to repel. Whatever justification exists for force used against a march does not transfer to a compound entered before that march began [Inference].
The honest limit on the period
Individually sourced incidents for October 2017 to January 2021 have not been assembled to the standard the register requires. Until they are, the documented pattern runs from August 2015 to September 2017 and is described here as two years and one month. Claiming six years on twenty-five months of sourcing is the kind of overreach that gets a file dismissed on a detail instead of answered on its merits [Inference].
Candidate events for retrieval include the subsequent phases of the Python Dance series and the southeast deployments of 2020 and early 2021. The Oyigbo operations of late 2020 took place in Rivers State, which lies in the South-South zone and not the South-East. They enter a register described as the southeast only if an operational connection or a shared target population is established, with that basis stated on the entry itself [Inference].
The distinction between widespread and systematic is worth working through on these five entries, because Article 7 requires only one of them and pleading both where the evidence supports one invites a Chamber to test the weaker. Widespread concerns scale, geographic spread and the number of victims, and Amnesty International’s documented minimum of at least 150 deaths across the southeast speaks to it. Systematic concerns organized and repeated conduct following a pattern, and improvised or spontaneous acts do not qualify [Inference].
Shared features across the four force entries bear on the second limb. Each involved military personnel acting against civilians in circumstances ordinarily governed by law enforcement. Three entries concerned pro-Biafra gatherings, and the identity or affiliation of the men in the roadside footage has not been established. In three entries the source record describes people gathered, asleep or already under control when force was applied: attendees at the school, people in the church compound and men in the pool. Whether these similarities amount to organization or repetition without direction is the question the operational records bear on [Inference].
What repetition proves, and what it does not
Article 7(2)(a) of the Rome Statute defines an attack directed against a civilian population as a course of conduct involving the multiple commission of listed acts pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy. The provision contains two requirements. Satisfying the first does nothing whatever for the second, and the distinction is where cases of this kind are won and lost.
Plate 18. The two requirements of Article 7(2)(a), the material the register supplies, and the records that bear on the policy element.
Multiple alleged acts across time, locations and deployments may support proof of a course of conduct, and the register supplies evidence of recurrence. Whether each entry proves an act listed in Article 7(1) remains for Part 3. Repetition alone does not automatically establish the policy the provision separately requires, and recurrence is also consistent with indiscipline, deficient training and an absence of effective control over troops [Inference].
A policy need not be formally adopted or reduced to writing. Its existence may be inferred from the manner in which the acts occurred and from the evidence considered as a whole. That inquiry must remain distinct from whether the alleged attack was widespread or systematic. Repetition may support an inference of policy, but repetition alone does not prove it. The inference must be tested against evidence of planning, direction, organization, deployment, command response and the use of institutional resources [Documented + Inference].
The Elements of Crimes fix the limits on inaction directly. Under the introduction to Article 7, a policy having a civilian population as the object of the attack would be implemented by State or organizational action, and such a policy may in exceptional circumstances be implemented by a deliberate failure to take action consciously aimed at encouraging the attack. The same text provides that the existence of a policy cannot be inferred solely from the absence of governmental or organizational action [Documented].
Material bearing on that inference includes the operational orders, the rules of engagement, the internal directives, the disciplinary record, and evidence of what commanders did on each occasion an incident was reported to them. None of those materials was located through the searches described in the methodology. Produced, they might establish policy, refute it, or prove incomplete and ambiguous, and this file does not predict which [Documented + Inference].
Government response is a field in the register and it is thin in every row. The searches turned up no official casualty figure for the Aba school shooting, no official account of who placed thirteen bodies in a pit, and no official statement on the entry into St Edmund’s. Where a response exists at all, it consists of denial or of a claim that the conduct did not occur as reported [Documented + Inference].
Coroners’ legislation in Abia and Anambra States was not retrieved for this review, so the powers available, the officer in whom they vest, and the circumstances triggering an inquest cannot be stated here. No coroner’s finding on any death in the register was located, and whether an inquest was legally required in any of these cases is a question this file leaves open pending retrieval of the governing statutes [Documented + Inference].
Production of the missing documents would change the register entirely. Each entry would name the formation deployed and the officer commanding it, would carry the rules of engagement issued that day and the ammunition drawn and returned, and would show what was reported upward and what followed. The result might establish policy, refute it, or leave the question where it stands, and any of those outcomes would improve on a decade of silence [Inference].
No new statute would be required for the competent authorities to review these records and disclose any non-exempt portions, though the Freedom of Information Act, military exemptions and security classifications would each govern what could lawfully be released. Their continuing absence from the public record is itself a fact about institutional transparency, and it does not establish what the records would prove [Documented + Inference].
The proscription of IPOB
The Indigenous People of Biafra was designated a terrorist organization in September 2017, in the same month as Python Dance II [Documented]. Proscription is not itself unlawful conduct, and a state may lawfully proscribe an organization on grounds its law recognizes. Whether the designation bears on the policy element depends on what changed in operational terms after it, which is a matter for evidence and not for assumption [Inference].
Two questions follow for any investigator: What deployment orders were issued after the designation? Did their terms differ from those issued before it? Both are answerable from records bearing on the policy inquiry under Article 7(2)(a), which is a further reason the operational file matters more than any single incident in the register.
Part 3 takes the register through every element of Article 7 and marks each one established, contested or unproved. That register is what makes the exercise possible, and its limits are what make the exercise honest. Five entries carry the file into the contextual analysis. The missing operational records behind those entries, and not the published reports supporting them, would carry the analysis further [Inference].
Evidence Docket
DOCUMENTARY RECORD
Adesomoju, A. (2017, September 26). FG gazettes IPOB ban, to write banks, embassies, foreign missions. Punch.
Amnesty International. (2016). Bullets were raining everywhere: Deadly repression of pro-Biafra activists.
Amnesty International. (2016, June 10). Nigeria: Killing of unarmed pro-Biafra supporters by military must be urgently investigated.
Amnesty International. (2016, November 24). Nigeria: At least 150 peaceful pro-Biafra activists killed in chilling crackdown.
Human Rights Watch. (2018, December 12). Nigeria: End impunity for killings of Shia.
PRIMARY AUTHORITIES
Federal Republic of Nigeria. (2017, September 20). Terrorism (Prevention) (Proscription Order) Notice, 2017, Government Notice No. 85, Federal Republic of Nigeria Official Gazette, Vol. 104, pp. A69–A73; giving effect to the Federal High Court, Abuja order in Suit No. FHC/ABJ/CS/871/2017, dated September 20, 2017.
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, arts. 7(1), 7(2)(a).
International Criminal Court, Elements of Crimes, art. 7, Introduction, paras. 2–3 and accompanying note on the implementation of a policy by deliberate failure to act.
Prosecutor v. Germain Katanga, Trial Chamber II, Judgment pursuant to article 74 of the Statute, ICC-01/04-01/07-3436-tENG, 7 March 2014, paras. 1108–1110.
Prosecutor v. Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo, Pre-Trial Chamber II, Decision pursuant to article 61(7)(a) and (b) of the Rome Statute on the charges, ICC-01/05-01/08-424, 15 June 2009, para. 81.
Prosecutor v. Laurent Gbagbo, Pre-Trial Chamber I, Decision on the confirmation of charges, ICC-02/11-01/11-656-Red, 12 June 2014, paras. 214–216.
Criminal Code, Cap 36, Revised Laws of Anambra State 1991, ss. 273, 274, 275. The Abia State enactment corresponding to it was not retrieved for this review and no section is cited for that state.
Administration of Criminal Justice Act 2015, s. 8(1), as a source of procedural safeguards and not of substantive offense.
RECORDS NOT RETRIEVED
Operational orders, rules of engagement, internal directives, ammunition returns and disciplinary records for each alleged-force incident in the register. Individually sourced incidents for October 2017 to January 2021 also remain outstanding, and the period claimed is limited accordingly.
Right of reply: no advance notice was given. Any person or institution named in this investigation may respond after publication. A substantive response will be published, and any demonstrated factual error will be corrected. The channel is published with the work and remains open for as long as this entry stands on the register. The Nigerian Army, the Nigeria Police Force, the Attorneys-General of Abia and Anambra States, 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.
