Two Nigerian soldiers have been arrested and charged with assault after they were filmed beating a disabled man with sticks in a busy street.<\/p>\n
The army said the reason for the assault, in Onitsha in Anambra state on Tuesday, appeared to be because the man was wearing a camouflage shirt.<\/p>\n
It said the soldiers had been charged “in line with our zero tolerance for acts of indiscipline”.<\/p>\n
Many Nigerians complain that soldiers are rarely punished for excesses.<\/p>\n
Human rights groups have persistently accused Nigeria’s military of abuses against civilians, especially in north-east Nigeria, where it has been fighting a long-running insurgency by militant Islamist group Boko Haram.<\/p>\n
Wearing camouflage clothing is a sensitive issue in Nigeria because militants and criminals have often worn camouflage clothing either to carry out attacks or impersonate soldiers for other criminal purposes.<\/p>\n
Section 110 of the Nigerian criminal code says it is an offence to unlawfully wear uniform of the armed forces or dress “having the appearance… of such uniforms”.<\/p>\n
Footage of the assault on the disabled man in Onitsha, in southern Nigeria, had been circulating on social media before the army commented.<\/p>\n
It said the “ugly incident” was “an isolated case which is not [a] true reflection of the Nigerian army”.<\/p>\n
News of the soldiers being charged came a week after another soldier was jailed for seven years for shooting dead a civilian at a market in the city of Maiduguri, in the north-east, last year.<\/p>\n
The soldier, who was not identified, was found guilty of manslaughter.<\/p>\n
In court, he argued that he acted in self-defence after the man he killed, named as Umar Alkali, tried to wrestle his rifle from him. The military court rejected this argument, deciding that he had used disproportionate force.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two Nigerian soldiers have been arrested and charged with assault after they were filmed beating a disabled man with sticks in a busy street. The army said the reason for the assault, in Onitsha in Anambra state on Tuesday, appeared to be because the man was wearing a camouflage shirt. It said the soldiers had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-292555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=292555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292555\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=292555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=292555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=292555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}