Press Statement By The Public Interest Lawyers League: The Ombatse Attack And The Many Questions

This week the Nigeria Police Force scored a new low in its fight against the many underground militia and terror groups that have seized the soul of our Fatherland. Nothing highlights the combat inadequacies of the Force than the many effeminate ways it confronts groups that maim and kill its officers, torch police stations and cart away arms and ammunitions. From Bayelsa to Borno, Yobe, Taraba, Adamawa and Jigawa states militants and terrorists make the Force appear like a ragtag band incapable of defending itself.

Doubtless, the gruesome killings of officers of the Force by members of the Ombatse cult are truly a new low.The ease with which the officers were ambushed and killed highlights the fact that the Nigeria Police Force is still rooted in its antiquated zombie strings’ strategy of combattingenemies of the Nigerian state by mobilising officers into arenas of armed conflicts in zombie strings. Everyday armed officers are headed like chickens in a single file of siren-blazing combat vehicles intoarenas of conflicts. In this day of modern policing, approaching arenas of conflicts in a manner shorn of ‘’military swarming’’ is suicidal. The Ombatse attack exposed the combat unpreparedness of the Force.

Officers we lose every day are our kin and kith. We can’t continue to make widows and widowers out of citizens whoare married to officers of the Nigeria Police Force.

We are alarmed by the ease with which forty-three officers of the Nigeria Police Force were ambushed and killed by Ombatse cultists; and we ask:

1. Was the police operation in Nasarawa-Eggon designed and managed by the Force’s High Command?
2. Was the operation informed by reconnaissance intelligence and how was the intelligence analysed?
3. Was there any Operational Command Control set up to manage the operation?
4. Were there reinforcement back-ups for the operation?
5. Was any risk analysis undertaken by the Operational Command Control before the slain officers were mobilised?

Whilst we condole with the men and women of the Force that have lost their beloved friends and colleague and with the widows, children and families of the slain officers who will forever bear the agonies of grieves, we demand answers from the apparatchiks of the Force’s High Command.

Abdul Mahmud, ESQ

President

11^TH May, 2013.