Army denies alleged massacre in Niger Delta

Nigerian troops have denied a claim by an activist group that they opened fire last week on unarmed villagers near the southern oil town of Warri, killing at least 51 people, hours after a soldier was killed in a clash with an armed gang. The Federated Niger Delta Ijaw Communities (FNDIC) group said in a statement on Saturday that 10 women, 19 children and 20 men were initially counted dead in the alleged 9 March dawn attack on Fenegbene by members of a special military task force stationed in the volatile region. Two more bodies, of a mother and a child, were recovered on Friday,FNDIC leader Bello Oboko told IRIN. Oboko said the ethnic Ijaw community of Fenegbene was attacked in an apparent reprisal for the killing of a soldier, a few hours before, by unknown gunmen at the mainly Ijaw Awor quarters of Warri - separated by a river from Fenegbene. “The Ijaw are at a loss finding the correlation between the Awor crime and the Fenegbene massacre,” said Oboko, “and feel it is perhaps meant to serve a deterrent to the Ijaw of Warri against agitating for their rights.” However, Maj. Said Ahmed, spokesman for the special military task force, “Operation Restore Hope” said on Saturday the authorities had no records of any additional casualties to those released earlier. “Operation Restore Hope” was set up in October last year to police the rise in violence between the Ijaw and Itsekiri communities, fuelled by competition for compensations and other payments made by oil companies to local authorities. The two communities have been fighting since early 1997 over the relocation of a local government headquarters from an Ijaw to an Itsekiri area. Ijaws claim electoral boundaries drawn for last year’s general elections disenfranchised most of their communities in favour of the Itsekiris. An estimated 3,000 troops are currently stationed in the Warri area, where more than 200 people have been killed during the last year. The commander of “Operation Restore Hope”, Brig-Gen. Elias Zamani, said on Tuesday that only five people had been killed, one soldier and four civilians, in the shootout at Awor. He said 79 people had been arrested and that the authorities were investigating the incident. Ahmed said of the 79 initially arrested, 58 have already been freed. He accused the Ijaw activist group of deliberately "whipping up sentiments" with the claims of massacre so as to play down the killing the soldier, and he insisted that troops did not attack Fenegbene. However, he did not rule out the possibility that there may have been victims of a "crossfire." "If a gun battle ensues between two parties, the crossfire can go anywhere, but they only attribute the crossfire to the soldiers," said Ahmed. In two separate incidents, one in the Niger Delta town of Odi in 1999 and another in central Nigeria in 2001, troops killed hundreds of people in reprisal attacks after local militias killed policemen and soldiers. Local and international human rights groups have blamed President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government for failing to punish soldiers responsible for those killings