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The police have dismissed 121 out of at least 167 police officers who absconded from a counter-terrorism training facility to avoid deployment against Boko Haram insurgents.
The 121 officers of the police rank-and-file were accused of committing mutiny and desertion, prompting Inspector-General Ibrahim Idris to order their dismissal with immediate effect.
A directive has gone out for several police units where the dismissed officers were attached to immediately retrieve all police equipment in their possession and remove them from payrolls, according to a December 26 signal.
The mass dismissal comes a day after news broke of the large-scale desertion, eliciting renewed nationwide concerns about Nigeria’s progress in the Boko Haram war, which is now entering its tenth year.
The 167 police officers were confirmed as having absconded were amongst the 2,000 sent on a counter-insurgency training at the Nigerian Army Special Forces Training School in Buni Yadi, Yobe State.
Scores of them disappeared after learning that they would be deployed in active combat against Boko Haram in communities where the insurgents are still virulent, as against relatively peaceful settlements like Maiduguri metro area.
They were then declared wanted, amidst fears that they could be harmful because they did not submit the arms, ammunition and other police equipment in their possession before fleeing.
The police had in their first reaction on Wednesday night strongly denied that the officers absconded.
Its spokesperson Jimoh Moshood said that the 2,000 officers were still in the training centre ready for deployment against Boko Haram thugs.
The signals detailing the mass dismissal, which were authenticated by police chiefs at the top command, surfaced, according to a PREMIUM TIMES report.
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Meanwhile, the Nigerian Army has contradicted the police’s claim that officers did not abscond.
The army said the police officers fled the training centre without permission, but added that many of them had been summarily caught and returned to the facility.
A report obtained by ElombahNews from man Army source says that “the said officers were to be sent to battle without appropriate training, and also observed that nearly all of them are southerners and Christians.
“Those are the names of policemen who were mobilised without any serious training to be sent to the front lines to fight Boko Haram who ran away,” said the source.
“Their names indicate that 96% of the total number mobilised are southerners.”
See full list of all the 190 officers involved in the deployment and desertion saga in the previous article below:
