President Muhammadu Buhari has been told to stop releasing arrested and detained terrorists “because members of the armed Islamists believe that if they kill as many innocent people as they want, they will deceptively surrender to the Army and be given exclusive and preferential treatment as repentant terrorists and released after few months of the so-called deradicalization programme organised by the military on the orders of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.”

Their release, according to a statement on Monday by the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), “is the major motivating factor for the expanding frontiers of threats of attacks by terrorists in Nigeria and the continuous attacks of soft targets.”

HURIWA in the statement signed by the National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, said that “the frequent and intermittent releases back into the society of terrorists with their hands drenched with the blood of innocent children, women, the elderly without making them go through mandatory judicial punitive measures of the nation’s justice system supported by the Grund Norm and as provided by the other relevant laws relating to murders and terrorism is the most potential recruitment grounds for ISWAP and Boko Haram terrorists networks in Nigeria.”

HURIWA also repeated the call on Buhari “to fire his incompetent and non performing National Security Adviser Major General Babagana Monguno (rtd) and rejig the hierarchies of the Armed Forces of Nigeria to reflect the Federal characters and to ensure that the status quo is not maintained.”

HURIWA stated thus: “We in the organised civil rights advocacy community believe that the policy of releasing terrorists back into the society after they may have and indeed inevitably shed blood of the innocent citizens amounted to the highest grade of illegality on the part of President Muhammadu Buhari just as the Rights group stated that Nigeria is about the only place in the World whereby the government of the day has conveyed to terrorists the idea that they can kill as many citizens as their guns and bullets and bombs can deliver to them and for as long as they desire and then what they need to do to gain reprieve is to surrender to the Army and they get some periods of the so-called deradicalization programme paid for by the law abiding tax payers after which they will be reintegrated back into the society and most of them end up disappearing back to join the terrorists groups to relaunch vicious attacks on civilians and government owned assets and men and officers of the Armed Forces of Nigeria. HURIWA blames the security tensions in Nigeria on this illegality of releasing detained terrorists back into the society as repentant terrorists when it is a universal fact that as an ideology, terrorists will never drop their conviction to kill for their belief system unless they are drastically punished in the severest of ways through the legal process.”

The rights group also blasted the Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Lucky Irabor, who recently revealed that a total of 101 combatants comprising members of the Boko Haram and Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP) groups have been moved from detention facilities for de-radicalization.

HURIWA which expressed sadness that the current administration is rather contributing to breeding terrorists by the implementation of the deradicalization programme, called on Nigerians to speak out loud and clear in condemnation of this abominable amnesty programme being granted to hardened terrorists.

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