The Slatest

Amnesty International Says Video Shows Nigerian Soldiers Slitting Throats of Boko Haram Suspects

Bomb damage in Maiduguri, Nigeria, in March. Amnesty International says Nigerian forces conducted extrajudicial killings of Boko Haram suspects after a different March attack on Maiduguri.

Stringer/Reuters

Amnesty International has released a video that it says depicts Nigerian soldiers conducting extrajudicial killings by slitting the throats of suspected Boko Haram terrorists, then leaving their bodies in mass graves. From Reuters:

In the most gruesome of the videos, suspects are kept to one side while graves are dug. Then the grave is shown half-full of bodies. A half-naked man is pulled from a truck and held down while a man in military uniform slices his neck open with a combat knife, hurling his body into the pit. The scene is repeated with another suspect on the same bloodied patch at the edge of [the] grave.

The footage comes a week after Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau released a video of his fighters beheading a Nigerian soldier—a standard practice for the militants.

Per Amnesty, the footage was taken in the aftermath of a Boko Haram attack on March 14—a month before the kidnapping of more than 200 girls from a school in Chibok.

Nigerian authorities say they are investigating the circumstances of the video and will punish those who are found to have broken the law. As Reuters notes, hesitance to support a military operation with a reputation for human rights abuses is “a primary reason cited by U.S. and British forces for not giving Nigeria more counter-insurgency support.”

Correction, August 6, 2014: This post’s photo caption originally misstated that Maiduguri is a city in Kenya. It is a city in Nigeria.