EXCLUSIVE: Bodies Of Soldiers Killed By Boko Haram Withheld From Families By Nigerian Army, Plans ‘Secret’ Burial In Borno

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Baring any last-minute change, the Nigerian Army on Tuesday will give soldiers recently killed on the front in the fight against insurgency a ‘secret and undignified burial’,  as given by multiple military sources.

However, a major in the army has mentioned that plans had been concluded by the military authorities to conduct a ‘secret’ burial on Tuesday for some of the dead soldiers whose bodies are still in the mortuary.

"They will be buried on Tuesday at a cemetery here in Maiduguri. The military have unfortunately, failed to open up on the fates of most of these fallen soldiers to their families. The army authorities have yet to inform families of some of these dead soldiers who they plan to bury tomorrow, how will you bury someone whose family members think is still alive? Even those that were informed were not given the bodies of their loved ones,” he said.

A brother of one of the dead soldiers said that the family got to know about his death from his colleague as the army authorities initially failed to inform them. 

He said the army hitherto did not notify them. Rather one of his colleagues told him he had been killed by Boko Haram so I spoke to someone from our town who is a major general, I think he made some moves. So we got a call from them on Saturday night informing us he is dead. Imagine, without his colleague telling us, we wouldn't have been aware at all. 

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We asked them the process to move his corpse back home for burial but they told us they would not release his body to us. We explained that it is a taboo in our village to be buried in a foreign land but they insisted his body would not be released to us. It was later they informed us that his next of kin and one other family member should come to Maiduguri because he would be buried on Tuesday. AFP report.

A US newspaper, Wall Street Journal in 2019 reported how the military had been secretly dumping the remains of soldiers killed by Boko Haram in unmarked mass graves.

The paper quoted families of fallen servicemen as saying that the military was untidy and seemingly unpathetic in its handling of the tragic deaths of their loved ones.

The report read that when President Buhari visited the Maiduguri base in November, commanders hastened under the cover of darkness to bury bodies they had collected at the morgue from the recent attack on the base in Metele and several others, according to several soldiers at the base.

A soldier was quoted as saying, "we could see the headlamps and the torches of the engineering division digging the graves.”

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