Unexploded ordnance threatens residents of southern town - rights group

Unexploded ordnance continues to threaten lives in the southern oil town of Odi, three years after it was flattened by soldiers in a reprisal raid, a Nigerian human rights group said on Monday.

Environmental Rights Action (ERA) said a 12-year-old boy was injured last week when a rocket exploded while his family was clearing debris from their old home, which had been destroyed during the November 1999 attack. "Tinbebelakumo Agadah was hit in many places by shrapnel from a rifle-propelled rocket which had lain for three years," ERA said in a statement. The group said other residents were equally at risk and called on the Nigerian authorities to clear the area urgently of all leftover ordnance.

Troops had invaded Odi on the orders of President Olusegun Obasanjo after armed militants there killed 12 policemen. The soldiers ransacked the town, destroying every building except a church and a bank and killing more than 200 people. Obasanjo said afterwards the soldiers "exceeded their brief" but refused to apologise for the killings.

ERA has threatened to lodge complaints for war crimes at the UN International Criminal
Court against Obasanjo and senior military officials over the Odi invasion. The group also wants the Nigerian government to rebuild Odi and pay compensation to the victims of the army raid.

In a report released last week, Amnesty International said the attack on Odi was one of two incidents in which the Nigerian military acted with impunity against civilians with the tacit approval of the government. The other was in October 2001, when reprisal attacks were carried out on villages in the central state of Benue for the killing of 19 soldiers.