Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua said on Tuesday he had ordered an investigation into last week’s deadly uprising in northern Nigeria, including the controversial killing of the leader of an Islamist sect.
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”This is an incident that will be investigated together with the overall events that have happened,” he said in response to reporters’ questions about his reaction to the killing of Boko Haram sect leader Mohammed Yusuf by police.
Yar’Adua said he had ”directed the national security adviser to carry out a post-mortem [probe] with the security agencies as a first step so that we can have a full report of what has happened during the crisis, including how the leader of the Boko Haram was killed, the circumstances under which he was killed”.
He said the preliminary report should be handed in before the weekend.
The government will at that stage ”determine what actions to take, whether we need to carry out further investigation into the entire matter, because it is really a very serious issue”, he added.
An uprising by the sect in several northern states and the security forces’ response killed more than 800 people, the majority of them sect members.
The leader of Boko Haram, 39-year-old Mohammed Yusuf, was killed in police custody on Friday after being captured by the military.
The police said that he died in cross-fire with security forces as he tried to escape.
United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay and rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have called on the government to investigate the security forces’ role in the violence. — Sapa-AFP