Tag: Nigeria

British government officials believe there is “chronic corruption” among Nigeria’s security forces and that many of the human rights accusations against them are “true”. But they want UK military assistance to continue as the country represents a “potentially huge market” for arms sales. That is Whitehall’s view of its key west African counter-terrorism ally, laid […]

Declassified visited villages in Nigeria ruined by indiscriminate air strikes, which killed civilians, levelled marketplaces and hit a school — months after we revealed Nigerian air force pilots were secretly training in the UK.

Nigerian air force personnel are learning to fly helicopters in Newquay, southwest England, amid allegations by Amnesty International that military aircraft have killed civilians in Nigeria. Yet the UK’s Ministry of Defence says it has no knowledge of this training.

On the 50th anniversary of the end of the Biafran war, the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in the late 1960s, declassified British files show that Harold Wilson’s government secretly armed and backed Nigeria’s aggression against the secessionist region.

The British files, released under the country’s declassification rules, show that UK officials sought “to take some of the heat out of the sanctions debate” that raged after the hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other members of Nigeria’s Ogoni community. Saro-Wiwa had led a non-violent protest campaign against pollution by Anglo-Dutch company Shell and […]