Rescued Boko Haram girls to be evacuated and health checked
Appeal court set to review hurricane killings case
FEDERAL prosecutors are asking an appeals court to reinstate the convictions of five former New Orleans police officers on civil rights charges stemming from the deadly shootings of unarmed civilians in storm-struck New Orleans in 2005.
Four of the men are charged in the shootings at the city’s Danziger Bridge, which happened a week after Hurricane Katrina hit the city and levee failures led to catastrophic flooding. A fifth former officer is charged in the cover-up that fell apart as federal investigators bore down.
Their 2011 convictions were thrown out by a federal judge who said anonymous online postings by prosecutors tainted the case. The officers remain jailed while prosecutors work to convince appeals judges yesterday that the convictions should stand.
The appeals court arguments come months ahead of the tenth anniversary of Katrina – and at a time when police officers’ use of force against the unarmed is under high scrutiny after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina; Eric Garner in New York City; and Freddy Gray in Baltimore.
As in those incidents, the victims in the Danziger shootings were black. However, some of the officers implicated in the shootings or cover-up, including two among the five convicted at trial, are also black.
The case dates back to 4 September, 2005, a week after the hurricane struck. The city remained badly flooded, with utilities out everywhere and the police under strain. Police shot and killed two unarmed people and wounded four others at the Danziger Bridge.
They said at the time that the officers were responding to a report of other officers being shot when they came under fire.
AFTER carrying out a mass rescue of 200 girls and 93 women from the forest stronghold of an Islamic insurgent group, Nigeria’s military is evacuating the females and plans to check their physical and mental health, an army spokesman has said.
Colonel Sani Usman said many are traumatised and the military is flying in medical and intelligence teams to examine them.
He added yesterday that it remained to be seen if any were among the 219 who are still missing more than a year after being snatched from a boarding school in Chibok, a town in north-east Nigeria, in a mass kidnapping that outraged much of the world.
The evacuation from the Sambisa Forest in north-east Nigeria began yesterday but Col Usman would not say where the rescued females are being taken. He added that they needed to be questioned to determine their identities.
“The processing is continuing, it involves a lot of things because most of them are traumatised and you have got to put them in a psychological frame of mind to extract information from them,” Col Usman said.
While the Chibok kidnapping on 14 April 2014 made the extremist group Boko Haram known to much of the world, the group has been steadily kidnapping females.
Amnesty International said this month that at least 2,000 women and girls have been abducted by Boko Haram since the start of 2014 and many have been forced into sexual slavery and trained to fight.
Of the women and girls who were rescued in recent days, an intelligence officer and a soldier said Boko Haram used some of them as armed human shields, a first line of defence that fired at troops. But the soldiers managed to subdue them and round them up, they added.
Col Usman said military operations continue in the forest where the women and girls were rescued, while troops destroyed four Boko Haram camps.
“Sambisa Forest is a large expanse of land, so what we were able to get is four out of several terrorist camps in the forest,” he said of the area that sprawls over 23,170 square miles.
Nigeria’s military largely stood by last year as Boko Haram took over dozens of towns and declared a large swathe of northeastern Borno state an Islamic caliphate.
That changed when a multinational offensive led by Chad began at the end of January.
Now, Nigeria’s military says it has driven the Islamic extremists out of towns with help from troops from Chad and Niger, while Cameroonian soldiers are guarding their borders to prevent the militants escaping.