Nigeria’s president calls for investigation after military strike kills at least 85 civilians

Nigeria’s President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on Tuesday called for an investigation into a drone strike by his country’s military that killed dozens of civilians on Sunday, the latest in a series of accidental bombings that have hit locals.

The strike took place on Sunday evening in a village in the northern state of Kaduna, where armed groups are rampant. Many of the victims were gathering for a Muslim festival, according to local authorities.

At least 85 people had been declared dead as of Tuesday, including children, women and the elderly, Nigeria’s top emergency response body, the National Emergency Management Agency, said. said in a statement.

At least 66 others were injured and the search for more bodies continued, the report said. Although there have been other accidental bombings in the past decade, Amnesty International said this was by far the deadliest and the death toll was closer to 120.

Mr Tinubu called for “a thorough and full-fledged investigation” into what he called a “bombing accident”, describing the events as “very unfortunate, disturbing and painful”, according to a statement from Nigeria’s presidency.

On Tuesday, Nigeria’s Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Taoreed Lagbaja, visited Tudun Biri, the village affected by the attack, and acknowledged the army’s responsibility. He said air patrols “observed a group of people and misanalyzed and misinterpreted their activity pattern as being similar to that of the bandits.”

Since being sworn in as president in May, Mr Tinubu has made tackling insecurity a high priority. Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country with 220 million people, is ravaged by Islamist groups in the east and by scores of armed gangs committing widespread killings and kidnappings in the northern and western states.

According to US sources, at least 700 civilians were killed between July and September SBM intelligencea Nigerian risk consultancy firm. Kidnappings by prieststeachers, schoolchildren and commuters has been plaguing the country for years.

Nigerian security forces are struggling to contain the violence. The military is West Africa’s largest and is a major recipient of US security assistance, but it has also been accused of widespread human rights abuses, including forced abortions And random killings.

“Despite reports of civilian casualties from Nigerian armed forces airstrikes and other concerns, the flow of U.S. weapons into Nigeria has not slowed,” researchers from Brown University and the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based nonprofit, wrote in a report published last year.

Isa Sanusi, Amnesty International’s country director in Nigeria, said Sunday’s strike had killed at least 120 civilians, according to his organization’s own figures.

“The Nigerian military is used to not being held accountable and getting away with these atrocities,” Sanusi said in a telephone interview. “That makes them less diligent and more reckless.”

Before Sunday’s attack, at least 90 civilians had been killed in airstrikes carried out by the Nigerian Air Force over the past five years, according to a Reuters analysis of a count by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a US-based crisis monitoring organization.

The count does not include civilian deaths in the three northeastern states where most extremist violence has occurred.

Ismail Alpha contributed reporting from Maiduguri, Nigeria.