The abortions were mainly carried out without the person's consent – and often without their prior knowledge. File Photo / Getty Images
The abortions were mainly carried out without the person's consent – and often without their prior knowledge. File Photo / Getty Images
The Nigerian military has allegedly terminated at least 10,000 pregnancies as part of a secret abortion campaign targeting women and girls in the country’s northeast, many of whom had been kidnapped and raped by Boko Haram militants.
A Reuters investigation spoke to dozens of witnesses who said that pregnant women and girls who escaped Islamist groups into the custody of the Nigerian military were beaten and either drugged into compliance or injected with abortion drugs without their consent.
Many of the victims of the alleged illegal and systematic program had been victims of Boko Haram, a powerful jihadist group that has kidnapped thousands to be slaves or jihadi wives.
Soldiers involved told Reuters that the unborn children were believed to be “predestined” to be insurgents like their fathers, so that the government had to “destroy [these] insurgent fighters before they could be born”.
The women and girls ranged from a few weeks to eight months pregnant; some were as young as 12 years old, interviews and records showed.
One victim called Fati, now in her early 20s, said she was captured by the jihadists and repeatedly raped for a year. She was four months pregnant when Nigerian soldiers eventually rescued her. “I felt the happiest I ever had in my life,” she said.
But about a week later, she was led to a dim cockroach-filled room at a military barracks in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state. Uniformed men gave her and five other women mysterious injections and pills.
Silenced with violence
After about four hours, she felt a searing pain in her stomach, and black blood seeped out of her.
After the women washed the blood down a squat toilet, she said, they were warned: “If you share this with anyone, you will be seriously beaten.”
Pregnant women and girls who escaped Islamist groups were either drugged into compliance or injected with abortion drugs without their consent. File Photo / Getty Images
The abortions were mainly carried out without the person’s consent – and often without their prior knowledge, according to the witnesses interviewed by Reuters.
Nigerian military leaders on Thursday denied the programme had ever existed and have said that reporters were part of a foreign effort to undermine the country’s fight against the insurgents.
Defence Chief General Lucky Irabor told reporters in Abuja that the army “will not investigate what you know is not true”.
But Nigerian opposition presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar’s administration vowed that if he won next year’s election he would launch a probe.
‘They dug a hole... and buried her’
Alice Kearns, chairwoman of the UK Parliament Foreign Affairs Committee, described the stories as “heartbreaking”.
She said it was “the responsibility of UK authorities to ensure that their support of the Nigerian military does not aid human rights abuses and we expect the Government to take these allegations seriously”.
Chris Smith, a Republican member of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, said that the credible reports “shock the conscience” and that sanctions should be used against the individuals responsible.
The reporters’ investigation is based on interviews with 33 women and girls and accounts collected from healthcare workers, security personnel, military documents and civilian hospital records. Together they describe thousands of abortion procedures.
Although the full scope of deaths from the nearly decade-long programme could not be determined, four soldiers and two security officers said they witnessed women die from abortions or saw their corpses afterwards.
“That woman was more pregnant than the rest of us, almost six or seven months,” Ibrahim said. “She was crying, yelling, rolling around, and at long last she stopped rolling and shouting. She became so weak and traumatised, and then she stopped breathing.
“They just dug a hole, and they put sand over it and buried her.”
