Nigeria attack recalls other killings by soldiers

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — Residents in Nigeria's northeast accused the military of burning down civilian homes in a recent fight with Islamic extremists that left at least 187 people dead, the latest in a series of incidents which authorities have been blamed for the killing of bystanders.

In separate incidents in 1999 and 2001, soldiers in Nigeria shelled villages, opened fire on residents and tortured civilians. While the military has denied abuse allegations surrounding the recent killings in Baga, the West African nation has a history of security forces indiscriminately killing civilians since it became an uneasy democracy after years of military rule.

And as officials hope to woo extremists into possible peace talks, the deaths of civilians and harassment by soldiers could likely betray its efforts. The government often claims its force is used only to combat the extremists, or criminals.

"You and I know nowadays the 'Boko Haram syndrome:' Anybody put in the public space as allegedly being killed in the course of fire as suspected Boko Haram persons, most members of the public will not fear it much," said Kemi Okenyodo, the executive director of the CLEEN Foundation, which monitors police and security forces in Nigeria. "Any crime that the public is strongly against it, it is easy to be used as a fluke for extrajudicial killings."

Government officials could not offer a breakdown of civilian, soldier and extremist deaths from Friday's fighting. Many of the bodies had been burned beyond recognition in fires that razed whole sections of the town, residents said. Those killed were buried as soon as possible, following local Muslim tradition.

Authorities also provide contradictory explanations about what really happened, as the military bans access for outside observers to an area officials want to describe as an insurgent stronghold.

Boko Haram members used heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades in the assault, which Brig. Gen. Austin Edokpaye said began after soldiers surrounded a mosque they believed was housing Boko Haram members. Extremists earlier had killed a military officer, officials said.

The fighting lasted for hours and the military said extremists used civilians as human shields— implying that soldiers opened fire in neighborhoods where they knew civilians lived. However, local residents who spoke to an Associated Press journalist who accompanied the state officials said soldiers purposefully set the fires during the attack.

Brig. Gen. Chris Olukolade, a military spokesman, on Tuesday declined to immediately answer other questions about the military's conduct and other issues surrounding the killings.

By the time Borno state officials could reach the city Sunday, a local government official said at least 185 people were killed, something not disputed by Edokpaye who accompanied officials on the visit. A spokesman for the Nigerian Red Cross said Monday that at least 187 people had been killed, while another 77 were receiving medical treatment.

A statement issued Tuesday by Edokpaye said only six civilians died in the fighting Friday, as well as one soldier and some 30 extremists. The brigadier general also claimed extremist fighters used "anti-aircraft guns" in the attack, arms never seen used before in the three-year-old insurgency. The statement also said the fighting occurred on April 16 — three days before the violence actually happened.

Nigeria's presidency has said the death toll "may be grossly exaggerated," but federal lawmakers have started their own investigations into the killings.

While Nigerian forces have served as peacekeepers in other African conflicts, many in the country remain fearful of soldiers. Nigerian media regularly reports on incidents where soldiers beat civilians in traffic or fight police officers in their own country.

"Fighting in a built-up area is a very difficult operation, but that notwithstanding, there must be standard rules of engagement," Senate President David Mark said Tuesday. "Those rules of engagement would not include mass killings, or extrajudicial killings, in any form."

But extrajudicial killings routinely occur in Nigeria, with police routinely shooting dead suspected "armed robbers," human rights activists say. That same mentality, a hangover from the military era when soldiers would routinely shoot dead prisoners on the then-swampy beaches of Victoria Island in Lagos, persists today.

Speaking Wednesday, President Goodluck Jonathan promised any soldier or security force member found committing such crimes would be "cautioned and treated in line with our own laws and regulations." But the nation's courts routinely drag out cases and such prosecutions remain rarer still.

"The problem of extrajudicial executions in Nigeria is closely linked to the remarkable inadequacies of almost all levels of the Nigerian criminal justice system," a United Nations report in 2006 on the killings said. The same report described how soldiers often operate without any rules of engagement when facing a civilian population.

There are several major cases in Nigeria's recent history of soldier abuses. In 2001, the military attacked some seven villages in Benue state following ethnic Tiv militants killing soldiers there. Witnesses said some 200 people died in the fighting that saw soldiers ransack villages, shell houses and gun down residents indiscriminately. In 1999, ethnic Ijaw activists claimed more than 200 civilians were killed by the military in Odi in Bayelsa state following the killings of police officers there.

A military raid in Nigeria's oil-rich Delta state in 2010 against militants there killed some 150 people, activists said, though soldiers blocked AP journalists from reaching the area at the time. And in October 2012, when extremists killed a military officer in Maiduguri, soldiers killed at least 30 civilians and set fires across a neighborhood in retaliation. The military later denied committing the abuses.

"In such incidents it is assumed by officials that the armed forces acted in 'self-defense' or were otherwise justified in carrying out retaliatory executions of civilians," the 2006 U.N. report reads. "Thus, although the intentional killing of unarmed civilians, whether in situations of armed conflict or otherwise, is a clear violation of both international and Nigerian law, impunity is the reality."

And despite Nigeria's presidency promising an investigation into the Baga killings, the same may continue to happen today.

"There is a consistent pattern in responding to these incidents," the U.N. said. "Major human rights violations are alleged; the authorities announce an inquiry; and either the resulting reports are not published, or the recommendations are ignored."

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Associated Press writer Haruna Umar in Maiduguri, Nigeria, and Bashir Adigun in Abuja, Nigeria, contributed to this report.

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Jon Gambrell can be reached at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP .

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Each side blames the other for Venezuela violence

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — All day, the political heirs of Hugo Chavez filled Venezuela's airways with a steady drumbeat of attacks on the man who says they stole the presidency from him. They called opposition leader Henrique Capriles a coup-plotter and said he was inciting post-election violence that had claimed seven lives and injured 61.

President-elect Nicolas Maduro further charged Tuesday that the violence was being bankrolled and directed by the United States, which said it wouldn't recognize his victory without a vote-by-vote recount demanded by Capriles.

It was not clear, however, whether the violence was as serious as Chavez's anointed successor claimed. Venezuela has an average of more than 40 homicides daily, one of the highest rates in the world, and the government offered almost no information on the deaths that Maduro blamed on "neo-Nazi gangs."

Capriles called the government assault a smoke screen to divert attention from his demand for a recount of every ballot from Sunday's election, which the National Electoral Council said Maduro won by 262,000 votes out of 14.9 million cast.

A number of opposition protests across Venezuela have turned violent, but apparently only after National Guard riot troops and police used tear gas and plastic pellets to turn back marchers converging on provincial offices of the electoral council.

While government officials complained of violence by Capriles' supporters, incidents of intimidation by gangs of pro-government forces, some armed, also occurred.

An Associated Press journalist witnessed a pro-government gang of motorcycle toughs rampage through Teques, seat of the state that Capriles governs. They tossed a firebomb into an opposition party office and smashed display cases and looted goods from a bakery they said was owned by a Capriles supporter.

In the western town of San Francisco in Zulia state, three journalists with the local newspaper La Verdad said they were arrested by motorcycle-borne National Guard troops and jailed overnight Monday because they had interviewed a family that the troops had harassed. Reporter Juan Jose Faria wrote that the troop's commander told the reporters the country was in the midst of a coup and that they were putschists.

Maduro accused opposition protesters of attacking government health clinics, a socialist party office and the house of electoral council President Tibisay Lucena on Monday, but the government provided no details. Like Chavez, Maduro has a history of making allegations he does not substantiate.

Meanwhile, Maduro's government announced that 15 countries had confirmed they were sending high-level delegations to Maduro's swearing-in on Friday. They included Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Haiti, Uruguay and Argentina.

The potential for violent street confrontations in the capital Wednesday seemed to be headed off when Capriles called off a planned march to electoral council headquarters. That decision came after Maduro urged his supporters to take to Caracas' streets at the same time.

"Whoever goes out into the street tomorrow is playing the government's game," Capriles said at a news conference. "The government wants there to be deaths in the country."

The president-elect spent Tuesday on state TV at various events demonizing Capriles as "a murderer" and coup plotter. And he heaped accusations on Washington — always a popular target of Chavez, for whom Maduro served as foreign minister for six years.

"The (U.S.) embassy has financed and led all these violent acts," Maduro said during an appearance at the state-owned oil company PDVSA, which accounts for more than 95 percent of Venezuela's exports.

The countries have been without ambassadors since 2010 and the latest U.S. charges d'affaires, James Derham, left the country Monday.

Maduro's rhetoric did not sound designed to encourage the rapprochement that he has told various visiting American politicians, most recently former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, that he is seeking.

The State Department said Tuesday that it was "difficult to understand" why Venezuela's electoral commission had not honored Capriles' recount call.

Capriles says Chavistas stole the election and provided reporters with some examples. At 283 polling stations, election monitors were forced to leave before vote counts, some at the point of a gun, he said. At one voting booth in the western state of Trujillo a total of 717 people voted when only 536 were registered, he said.

People marched in various provincial capitals Tuesday to demand a recount. In Barinas, Chavez's home state, troops fired tear gas and plastic pellets at protesters marching on the provincial headquarters of the electoral council. Opposition leaders reported 30 arrests and three minor injuries.

Barinas Gov. Adan Chavez is a brother of the late president, who succumbed to cancer March 5 after 14 years as president. The opposition blames Chavez for economic disarray, worsening power outages and rampant crime.

Interior Minister Nestor Reverol accused Capriles of numerous crimes, including insurrection and civil disobedience. National Assembly speaker Diosdado Cabello said criminal investigations should also be opened against two top Capriles aides, Lara state Gov. Henry Falcon and Carlos Ocariz .

The Chavistas have long used a loyal criminal justice system to repress the opposition, human rights groups say. A Capriles campaign aide, Leopoldo Lopez, is currently facing influence-peddling charges in a 15-year-old case that he calls part of an attempt to selectively silence a now-emboldened opposition.

Security analyst Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America said the rising tension increases chances that the government could arrest opposition leaders, although he wondered whether security forces would comply with a wave of arrest orders.

He said he was more concerned about "mob violence against opposition figures, and perhaps pro-government ones, too."

Chief prosecutor Luisa Ortega, who announced the death toll, said 135 people had been detained in protests, presumably on Monday.

That's when Capriles' supporters protested in Caracas and other major cities, including Barinas, Merida in the west, and Maracay in the central industrial heartland.

Ortega did not provide identities for the dead and injured or say where the violence occurred. She said the dead belong to the "working class." The state news agency, AVN, said three of the dead were from the state of Zulia and one each from Tachira and Sucre states. It said, in addition, that eight Cuban-run health clinics, three offices of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela and three state-run Mercal supermarkets were "burned."

Officials said one death involved a man in the capital's Baruta district supposedly shot by opposition supporters in front of a Cuban-run health clinic when he and others where chanting pro-Maduro slogans. The AP visited the scene and could not establish in interviews with neighbors whether the killing was politically motivated.

It did determine, however, that 45-year-old Jose Luis Ponce, a carpenter, was not killed near the clinic. The government later corrected its version to reflect that.

Reverol said the other shooting deaths were being investigated.

Capriles said the government is to blame for any violence.

People across the nation banged on pots and pans Tuesday night to demand a recount at a pre-arranged evening hour, just as they did twice on Monday at Capriles' request.

He called for such "cacerolazos" every evening this week until Friday, when he said the cacophony should coincide with Maduro's swearing-in.

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Associated Press writers Vivian Sequera, Fabiola Sanchez and Christopher Toothaker contributed to this report from Caracas, and video journalist Marko Alvarez from Teques.

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