Amnesty International, a global watchdog on injustice, has appealed to the Nigerian public to halt incessant mob attack on people accused of criminal behavior.
The Organization, while held a sensitization walk around some parts of Calabar at the weekend, frowned at a situation where people take laws into their hands instead of reporting criminal acts to the Police.
Programm Manager of the Amnesty organization, Barbara Magaji who spoke to Journalists after returning from the Walk under a sustained rainfall, disclosed that not less than 555 people have been mobbed across the six geo-political zones in the country within eleven years.
According to her, “victims of mob violence are either framed up or unjustly attacked because someone raised a false alarm against them in public places which includes market places.”
She also disclosed that her organization spent two years to document stories of such attacks noting: “Every year, out of the 11 years used for the study on mob violence, averagely 55 people die as a result of mob violence.”
“We spent two years documenting situations that happened across the country on mob violence for a period of 11 years, from 2012 to 2024,” she stated.
She added: “From the study we carried out, we discovered that people are killed because of allegations of witch craft, or himself or someone has said that some has stolen something in a public place.
“We also discovered that victims are sometimes wrongly stoned or burnt to death. Members of the public should stop taking laws into their hands and instead report such matters to me Police,” she contended.
Giving insight into how the organization arrived at the figures, Mogaji said” “The test was done in Nigeria across the six geo-political zones. We focus on every geo-political zone, all occurrences we saw across the states, we were able to document.”
