Forgotten Men of Gallari: A Mass Arrest And A Village Pushed to Brink of Extinction

FIRST STORY:

Forgotten Men of Gallari: A Mass Arrest And A Village Pushed to Brink of Extinction

Ten years ago, Nigerian soldiers stormed Gallari village in Borno State, rounding up and arresting most of the men before the distraught eyes of their wives, children, and parents. The operation was carried out during the period of Boko Haram's infamous abduction of 250 schoolgirls, but while the world focused on the latter, Gallari's tragedy slipped into obscurity.

It was around 8 a.m. when the first signs of trouble began. Fatime and her family were going about their day, unaware of the chaos about to engulf their lives.

Suddenly, a group of soldiers, together with members of the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), stormed their village, their presence causing immediate panic among the residents. Confusion spread as people engaged in their daily chores, fetching water and tending to animals, were abruptly rounded up and gathered.

“We were all bewildered,” Fatime recounted, her voice trembling as she relived the traumatic moments. “We were summoned and sat there under their custody, not knowing what was happening.”

The soldiers made their intentions clear in a chilling declaration. As if to justify the severity of the situation, an aircraft flew over the area while many military vehicles arrived, amplifying the sense of impending doom.

The scene that followed was one of brutality and despair. The soldiers, displaying an alarming level of aggression, began flogging the men with sticks. Fatime could do little more than watch in horror. “We were all sad about it,” she said, her eyes reflecting the pain of those harrowing hours.

The brutality extended to Fatime’s own home. A soldier entered her room, demanding that she step outside with her baby. The situation quickly escalated as two soldiers threatened to shoot her if she didn’t produce a gun, which she firmly denied having. One soldier asked her to return to her room, while another demanded she strip off her clothes and hand them over.

“They rummaged through our room and did not find anything they were looking for,” Fatime recalled.

Her husband, Audu, was already held at gunpoint in front of their hut. Fatime says he was ordered to remove his clothes and was beaten when he struggled to take off his shirt. He was then ushered to join a group of other adult men who had been rounded up. They were all unclothed and had hands tied tightly.

That was the last time Fatime set eyes on her husband. He was carried away, leaving behind six children, including a newborn baby. Nearly all the other adult men in the community — numbering 42 people — were arrested, too. This was nearly a third of the village’s entire population of about 150 people.

When this tragedy befell Gallari that Friday morning in 2014, it was around the same time Boko Haram terrorists abducted about 300 girls from a government school in Chibok, southern Borno state. The news of the kidnapped schoolgirls made the headlines of numerous local and international news platforms, stirring concerns and condemnation across the world.

While this went on, large-scale human rights abuses by Nigeria’s state forces went under the radar, including the incident at Gallari. Ten years later, victims of the mass arrest shared their chilling experiences with HumAngle. They call the story The Forgotten Men of Gallari.

At the time of filing this report, the Nigerian Army was yet to respond to inquiries regarding the mass arrest. A letter was sent to the Nigerian Army Headquarters requesting information and clarification on the matter, but no reply has been received. Similar efforts to reach the Army spokesperson via telephone were unsuccessful.

‘They left us with nothing’

Kellu Janga was 58 years old when nine members of her family were taken away.

She was sleeping in her hut when the continued screams of her grandchildren woke her up. While she draped herself in a veil and processed what was going on, soldiers dashed into the hut and directed her and her grandchildren to step out.

A decade later, Kellu still vividly remembers the incident.

“My three sons and my six grandchildren were all taken away, and we don’t know why. We are all innocent, but they carried all our men, leaving us with nothing,” she told HumAngle.

She remembers standing up and asking the soldiers where they were taking their children. One responded that they would bring them back as soon as possible. But Kellu has not set eyes on them since then.

Aisha Muhammed’s household was affected, too. When she heard about the raid, she quickly rushed there to check on her loved ones and found out that her father, the head of the village (bulama), and nine of her brothers were among those arbitrarily arrested. She could not believe her ears, fainted several times and started sobbing. Years later, she still carries the burden from that day.

The community was left shattered by this incident, as the affected families had no idea where to search for their loved ones. Ten years on, the families’ anguish remains, and the fate of those arrested remains unknown.

Abubakar, who was only ten years old when the incident happened, was among the first to sense something was wrong. Unaware of the purpose, he saw a line-up of military trucks approaching the village.

“On [that] Thursday evening, while I was returning home after a long day grazing a small herd belonging to my parents, I saw many military vehicles filled with armed soldiers, moving slowly,” he narrated.

The following day, Abubakar went out to graze, but he heard a strange crowd noise before venturing too far, causing him to rush towards the commotion.

“My village was surrounded by soldiers laying on the ground and pointing their guns while others barged into houses, arresting people. They beat people while separating men, women, and children. I watched in horror, frozen in place,” he said.

“My father and three uncles were taken away before my eyes. I remember sobbing while watching them pushed into the vehicle. My mom was crying together with the remaining people, who were only infants, women, and one old man,” Abubakar told HumAngle.

Despite his young age, Abubakar had to assume the responsibility of caring for the remaining people in his family — especially his three younger sisters, one younger brother, and their maternal grandmother, Kellu, who lost her sight following the mass arrest.

After fleeing and settling in Mulai, a community on the outskirts of the state capital, Abubakar had to fend for himself because his mother struggled to provide enough for their family. Before she finally lost her sight completely, his grandmother would go out to beg on market days.

Abubakar’s mother, Maryam, held onto the hope that her husband would return home soon, which kept her from remarrying. She worked as a labourer on a farm and received little food support from a humanitarian organisation. However, after her death, the responsibility of catering to the family fell solely on Abubakar.

“I make a sale, mostly less than ₦1,500, and spend the money to feed my siblings and our grandmother. No one has helped us since our mother died,” Abubakar said.

Abubakar was thrust into this life unprepared, navigating stages of hardship as a displaced person haunted by memories of his family. As life grew more challenging, he ventured into farming in volatile areas, cultivating fields and planting sorghum. But each farming season came with its difficulties.

“I don’t apply anything on the farm because we cannot afford them. Things like fertilisers are very expensive, and I plough the field myself,” Abubakar explained.

When HumAngle met Abubakar for an interview, he had just returned from the farm, and his face was etched with disappointment. The reason was that the field he cultivated was submerged in water, which damaged his crops.

“I planted 3.5 mudu (approximately 5.25 kg) of sorghum at ₦6,500. Yet the crops were damaged this morning due to flood and excess rainfall,” he said, despair in his voice.

An elderly woman with a headscarf sitting inside a hut with dried reeds walls.
The incident left Kellu blind due to long hours of crying. Photo: Usman Abba Zanna/HumAngle
Abubakar never searched for his father and uncles, unsure where to start or who to meet.

“My wish is to raise my siblings and care for my grandmother because these are the only people I have for now. If my father returns, fine and good, but if he doesn’t, I believe in fate. I haven’t lost hope; I believe they are alive, and we hope one day they will return,” he said.

In contrast, his grandmother has sacrificed everything to find her beloved children. She sold their assets, including sheep, cattle, and personal belongings, to fund her desperate search. However, she fell prey to unscrupulous security agents operating in the area.

“All our resources have finished. Several people duped us, saying they would assist us in releasing our children. We sold all our 15 cattle and a few sheep just to pay people who lied to us that they could help us,” Kellu lamented.

“We paid ₦600,000, ₦400,000, ₦240,000 and about ₦700,000 to different people at different times for them to process the release of my children and grandchildren, but they ended up scamming us.”

She has given up on trying after exhausting her resources and still finding no answers, but she is hopeful that help will come someday.

The relentless trauma and grief took a devastating toll on Kellu’s health. Her eyesight was affected because of frequent crying. She now depends on the little support from her grandchild, Abubakar, to meet her basic needs.

The mass arrest has had a devastating effect on the families of Gallari village. As the men were forcibly taken away, their loved ones became displaced and scattered across far-flung locations.

Once anchored by their partners, the wives were now left to fend for themselves and their children. Unable to bear the hardship, many have had to remarry, leaving behind the memories of their absent husbands. Some abandoned their children because their new husbands wouldn’t accept the responsibility of caring for them.

The children have also been robbed of their fathers’ guidance and protection and have had their childhoods disrupted. Some now live with relatives, while others have been forced to fend for themselves on the streets.

The once close-knit and thriving community has been fractured, leaving behind a trail of broken families and shattered dreams. As the years pass, the hope of reunification dwindles, and the reality of a lost generation sets in. The women, once full of life and promise, now wear the weight of their loss. The children, too, bear the scars of their displacement, their laughter and smiles replaced by the harsh realities of survival.

To gather the names of all the 42 men arrested by the Nigerian Army, HumAngle organised a focused group discussion, which included Modu, the deputy village head, and other residents. The atmosphere was filled with tears and anguish as they compiled the list, and each person mentioned the name of someone they knew.

Modu Chelu, the deputy village head of Gallari, sits in the quiet corner of Mulai, where some of his displaced community members have resettled after being uprooted. His face bears the marks of years spent battling the weight of loss and the relentless pursuit of justice.

Modu was the only man from his village spared during the mass arrest. He escaped due to his advanced age and severe illness.

“We lived together for all these years,” Modu explained. “No single person among us cheats people or even picks something that doesn’t belong to them without the owner’s consent. Farming is our only means of survival.”

But the peace of Gallari was shattered when soldiers and the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) descended on the village. “They [the soldiers] were shouting ‘Kufita’ [‘to beckon’ in Hausa], but I didn’t even know what it meant,” he recalled.

According to Modu, before the men were taken away, the soldiers transported the captured villagers to a nearby area called Kaye, where they were detained. Tensions ran high as soldiers debated their next move. “One of them said they should just leave us and go. Another person said they were asked to bring them here and were not given orders to do anything else. Then, the commander screened us and exempted me. They took the 42 people away in their vehicles.”

The heartache of the situation is compounded by the fact that most of the 42 people taken were close relatives and friends of Modu.

“Only two are not my relatives. The remaining 40 include my children, distant relatives, my brother’s children, and the children of close friends. I am the only one left in the family,” Modu said.

After the soldiers left, the villagers prepared to flee. Modu, on the other hand, immediately sought help from the ward head, Bukar Kolo, and other influential political figures. Despite their best efforts, the trail went cold. “We waited, and up to today, we haven’t seen any of them; there’s not any tangible news,” he said.

“We lost almost all our wealth because of this issue,” he further observed. Scammers exploited their desperation, promising information in exchange for money, but they never delivered. “All our wealth got finished this way. We have really suffered severely.”

Despite the hardships, Modu clings to hope, bolstered by whispers from distant towns that the 42 are alive but held in a faraway place.

“I need my people back. I just want them back,” he pleaded.

The first story was first published in October, 2024: https://humanglemedia.com/forgotten-men-of-gallari-a-mass-arrest-and-a-village-pushed-to-brink-of-extinction/

IMPACT IN SECOND STORY:

What Happened to Gallari’s 42 Men After 12 Years in Military Detention?

Three of the 42 men from Gallari, a community in North East Nigeria, who were arbitrarily detained by the military 12 years ago, have finally regained freedom. Two returned with severe health problems, while the third is completely blind. This is the story of what happened to the rest.

Before his arrest 12 years ago, Ahmadu Gujja was a strong man in his mid-20s and his family’s breadwinner. Life in Gallari, his village, was simple and fulfilling. He farmed, reared animals, and has supported his widowed mother and seven younger siblings since his father’s death.

Gallari is a community of the Shuwa Arab tribe in Konduga Local Government Area (LGA) of Borno State, northeastern Nigeria. The remote village lies along Damboa road, 28 km away from Maiduguri, the state’s capital, 12 km from the nearest military base, and 98 km away from Chibok LGA.

In 2014, a tragedy struck. For Gallari, it meant near extinction. For Ahmadu, it meant losing everything overnight. He had just married his second wife and was eagerly expecting the birth of a child from his first wife when the tragedy unfolded.

When HumAngle met Ahmadu, the weight of the memories of that day was almost unbearable. Blind now from injuries and neglect suffered in detention, he struggled through tears to recall what happened.

“I can never forget the day,” Ahmadu started.

On Thursday in April 2014, one week after the 276 school girls in Chibok were abducted by the infamous Boko Haram group, soldiers in a convoy with the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) drove past Gallari without incident. Villagers, including Ahmadu and his neighbour Abubakar, remember seeing them.

But the following morning, everything changed. Around 9 a.m., soldiers and CJTF members surrounded the village, herding men, women, and children into a square.

Ahmadu had barely woken. He was waiting for his wife to finish cooking and to heat water for his bath, a daily routine for Ahmadu before taking his herd to graze. Instead, he was stripped alongside 41 other men. Among them were two strangers, one from a neighbouring village who had come to the market, and another who cut trees for a living.

“They gathered everyone in the village. They asked if we were Boko Haram. We told them no, but they wanted us to say yes,” Ahmadu recalled.

The soldiers picked all 42 men, tortured them in front of their families, and hauled them away in military trucks to Dalwa, a nearby village. “Some had their ears cut off, others were stabbed. I myself was tied with ropes and beaten by soldiers and members of the CJTF,” Ahmadu recounted the horrors of that morning.

Before transporting them further, soldiers interrogated the men about the abducted Chibok girls, whether they had seen Boko Haram passing through or witnessed the girls being taken. “We told them we saw nothing, that we don’t know Boko Haram,” Ahmadu told HumAngle.

That same day, the men were moved to Giwa Barracks in Maiduguri. The conditions there were appalling, he recounted.

“The cell was very tight, with no good toilet. We could only defecate in a bucket. There was not enough water, and the food was not enough,” Ahmadu said, adding that their hands were tied tight from behind for as long as he could remember.

They were given pap in the morning, maize for lunch, and semovita at night. Soldiers continued to interrogate them, demanding that they confess to being Boko Haram members.

“We suffered to the extent that if we were hiding something, we would have confessed,” he said.

For one week, they endured torture, including being tied up and left under the scorching sun from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., given just a bottle of water and a biscuit. Within days, three of the men had died due to hardship, untreated injuries, and the unbearable living conditions.

Years of darkness

After a week at Giwa, 39 survivors from Gallari were flown with hundreds of other detainees to a military detention centre in Niger State, North Central Nigeria. The conditions there were even worse. Their clothes were stripped, and their trousers cut short. They were forced to sleep on bare floors. Water was scarce. It was simply depressing, Ahmadu recounted.

“They gave us water in a teacup, and it was not daily. Sometimes we spend a whole day without water. They gave us tea with bread, but without water, we couldn’t eat. Sometimes, we drank our urine,” he recounted.

The first year was especially deadly. Ahmadu said many detainees died from hunger and suffering. “We have witnessed several cases of dead bodies disposed of in the cell. I did not have the count, but many Gallari men died within that period,” Ahmadu told HumAngle.

It was in Niger that Ahmadu began to lose his sight, first from a head injury during interrogation, then from months in darkness. “They kept us in a cell for one year without seeing the sun. When they later brought us out, they told us to look at the sun. That was when my eyes began to hurt,” he recalled. “I first lost vision from the right eye, then one year later, I lost the vision of the left eye. Turning me completely blind in a protracted year.”

For years, he suffered without treatment. Doctors in the prison said they had no specialist, and he was denied access to outside care.

After six years in detention, a court declared Ahmadu and others innocent. But instead of being released immediately, they spent more years in detention.

“The court said we were not guilty, but we still stayed,” he said.

For more than 11 years, Ahmadu did not hear from his family. “I gave up because I had lost everything. I had stopped thinking about home because it only reminded me of memories I had missed and would never get back. I missed my two wives and the unborn child I left,” he said.

The isolation drove him to despair. At one point, he contemplated suicide. Ahmadu started shedding tears from the eyes he could no longer see with when he recalled the memories.

A shattered homecoming

In 2024, the detainees declared innocent were moved to Mallam Sidi, a rehabilitation centre in Gombe State in the country’s North East, where they underwent social reintegration activities. That same year, HumAngle compiled a list of the 42 men from Gallari who had been arrested and remained untraceable to their families. We submitted the list to the Nigerian army, asking for their whereabouts. HumAngle never heard back.

But in April 2025, Ahmadu and two brothers from Gallari — Mohammed and Hashim Garba — were freed and reunited with their families in Maiduguri. “Out of the 42 men from Gallari, only five survived. And out of the five, only three of us were released,” Ahmadu told HumAngle. “The other two, Maina Musa and Isa Usman, remain in custody, waiting for court hearings.”

The military transported them to the Maryam Abacha Hospital in Maiduguri. They were received by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which offered them food and asked about their problems. But no medical care was provided. The military then told them to call their families or find their own way home.

For Ahmadu, returning home after 12 years was devastating. His first wife, pregnant at the time of his arrest, had died with her unborn child from grief and trauma. “She was not eating; she vomited up any meal we made her to eat,” Ahmadu’s mother recalled.

His second wife had been abducted by Boko Haram, bore four children for a fighter before fleeing, and when she heard the news of Ahmadu, she tried to reunite with him. But he refused.

Since his release, Ahmadu has continued to suffer excruciating pain in his eyes and head. With no access to proper medical care, he relies only on the little drugs his mother can afford from local vendors, mostly painkillers that provide temporary relief but do not address his actual ailments.

Two months after his return, Ahmadu continues to live with deep trauma that affects his daily life. His mother, who had long lived with little hope of ever seeing her son again, was overjoyed at his release. In her happiness and out of concern for his condition, she quickly arranged a small wedding so that Ahmadu could have a companion to support him through the hardship of his blindness.

In June, three months after he was freed, Ahmadu married his new wife. Today, the couple depend largely on his ageing mother, who struggles to provide for them from the little income she makes selling dairy milk. “My biggest fear is for my younger ones. My mother is still the one caring for me,” Ahmadu lamented.

He lives in an unfinished building under thatch that barely gives them shelter. It’s the rainy season, and everywhere is leaking in the room when HumAngle visits his home. Now blind and dependent with no livelihood, Ahmadu lives in humiliation. “Whenever it rains, we cannot sleep because the roof leaks. Before, even our goats had better shelter than this,” he said quietly.

Ahmadu lives with trauma and the weight of a lost life. He longs for justice but fears causing unrest. “If I can get my rights without causing any riot in Nigeria, I will be glad. But I don’t want anything that will cause a problem. We need a lot of help; I need support to start a business so that I can take care of my new family,” he said.

The brothers’ ordeal

Like Ahmadu, Mohammed, 35, and Hashim, 32, were ordinary herders and farmers before the raid. Soldiers seized them alongside the other men of Gallari. Mohammed remembers the day clearly. He was sitting with his wife, about to eat, before taking his animals out to graze. Then soldiers in nearly 40 vehicles surrounded the village.

From Gallari to Dalwa, then Giwa Barracks, and finally Niger State, the Garba brothers lived through the same cycle of torture and despair as Ahmadu.

“My friend Dahiru died in my presence because of thirst,” Mohammed said. “We could go four days without water. Some of us even drank urine to survive. By the time the Red Cross came to bring carpets and water, 37 of our people had died.”

Hashim recalled how three men died from torture before his distraught eyes within a week at Giwa Barracks. He also watched his elder brother faint under the beatings. Mohammed’s left ear was cut off, his wrists and back etched with scars from where he had been tied. Hashim, too, bore the marks of restraint and filth, his skin discoloured from months without bathing.

When the International Committee of the Red Cross intervened, conditions improved slightly, but the damage was irreversible.

Although eventually declared innocent by the courts, Mohammed and Hashim remained imprisoned. “We were told to calm down, that someday we would be released. It took 11 years,” Mohammed recounted.

At the rehabilitation centre in Gombe, where they were finally transferred, the brothers heard devastating news from home. “I heard that my wife and unborn child had died. My father, too, had died,” Mohammad said quietly. “When we were captured, my wife was pregnant. She gave birth to a dead child because of the way they took us. Later, she also died.”

Hashim’s grief was different but just as heavy. “We came back with nothing,” he said.

“Even this phone I use was given to me by my mother. I feel shy when I see people I used to know as children, now grown up. Everything has changed while we were gone,” he said.

The brothers returned to find their family scattered and their property gone. Before his arrest, Mohammed owned about 30 cows and goats. His herd and even his house are now gone. “We only depend on our elder brother, who is taking care of our mother. We want to be self-reliant again,” Hashim said.

Both men carry lasting scars. Mohammed struggles with heart pain and breathing difficulties. Hashim still bears deep marks on his wrists and head.

“When we first came back, I couldn’t even walk to the toilet without help. I had to reduce how much water I drank just to avoid disturbing people every time,” he said.

But beyond the physical pain is the humiliation of starting life from nothing.

“We don’t want to be beggars. If I can have a wife, I can have someone to help me every day. But now, even marriage is far from us. Before, I married my wife with ₦100,000. Today, you need nearly a million. And I have nothing,” Mohammed said.

Upon release, Ahmadu, Mohammed, and Hashim told HumAngle that the authorities gave them ₦50,000 cash. “They wasted 12 years of our lives. How can we recover with ₦50,000? I exhausted the money two days after my release,” Mohammed told HumAngle.

‘When we saw them, we cried’

The release of Ahmadu and the Garba brothers broke years of silence but also reopened deep wounds, especially for families who have lost loved ones forever. “When we saw them, we cried. They were unrecognisable,” a relative told HumAngle.

Other locals, like Kellu Janga, spent everything they had chasing hopes of reunion. She turned to people who claimed they could help to secure the men’s release, but those efforts proved futile. Her grief eventually cost her her eyesight, and she now depends on her grandson Abubakar for survival.

“We need the government to tell us where the rest are. We need justice,” Modu, the village’s deputy head and the only man spared during the mass arrest, told HumAngle.

Gallari’s tragedy has remained invisible, overshadowed by global attention to other incidents like the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls that led to the raid. While the world mourned those girls, Gallari’s men vanished in silence. No official explanation has ever been given. The Nigerian Army has not responded to HumAngle’s letters seeking answers.

Children who were toddlers when their fathers were seized are now teenagers, growing up without fatherly support. Some dropped out of school to fend for themselves.

Abubakar, only ten when his father and uncles were taken, has carried the burden of raising his siblings ever since. “I just want to see my father again. If he is alive, let them bring him back. If not, we deserve to know,” he said.

‘A gross violation of the constitution’

In the North East, transitional justice has often focused on the reintegration of former Boko Haram members through initiatives such as the Disarmament, Demobilisation, Rehabilitation, and Reintegration Borno Model (DDRR) programme, a counter-terrorism project aimed at rehabilitating and reintegrating surrendered Boko Haram members back into society, and Sulhu, a local peace and deradicalisation initiative.

While these efforts aim to end violence and rebuild communities, they leave behind unresolved wounds for families whose loved ones were arrested arbitrarily and held without trial for years. For these families, justice is not about reintegration alone but also about truth, accountability, and the right to know the fate of those taken away.

Relatives of detainees interviewed by HumAngle argue that any conversation about reconciliation feels incomplete and one-sided when innocent civilians remain behind bars without trial. Their demand is simple: justice must include the release or fair trial of those held in military detention centres, alongside information about those who have died in custody.

For them, healing cannot come from dialogue with insurgents while their own sons, brothers, and fathers languish in silence and neglect.

Aisha, one of several individuals and groups in Borno State advocating for justice and the release of their loved ones, expressed the frustration shared by many. “How can we have Sulhu with Boko Haram members who were the cause of the mass arrests, detentions, and killings? Our children, sons, relatives, and parents have been detained without trial for many years, and you want us to accept Sulhu? Release our children if you want justice for all. Our children were innocent when the military arrested them,” she said.

Aisha’s activism began with seeking the release of her own son, arrested along with other youths in a mosque in 2012. Since then, she has become a prominent voice for families whose loved ones remain in military custody.

Sheriff Ibrahim, a lawyer and human rights activist in Maiduguri, described the detention of the Gallari men as “a gross violation of the Nigerian Constitution and international human rights law.” He explained that under Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution (as amended in 2011), no person should be detained for more than 24 hours or at most 48 hours without being charged in court.

“The law is clear. Anyone arrested should either be charged within that time frame or released on bail. To hold people for over 10 years without trial is unlawful and unconstitutional,” he said.

According to Ibrahim, the fundamental rights of the Gallari men and their families were completely violated. Chapter Four of the Constitution guarantees the right to life, the right to human dignity, and freedom of movement. “These men were presumed innocent but were treated as though they were guilty without evidence. Their families too suffered years of separation, uncertainty, and economic hardship,” he added.

He further noted that survivors and families of those who died in detention have the right to seek justice and compensation from the Nigerian state. “The victims, survivors, and their families can sue the government for unlawful and unjustified detention. There were no prior charges against them, no fair hearing, and no due process. These are the most basic rights guaranteed by law,” Ibrahim told HumAngle.

In contrast to the treatment of Boko Haram fighters and innocent civilians, Ibrahim criticised what he described as double standards in the Nigerian justice system. “Former Boko Haram members who committed crimes against humanity are reintegrated into society through government programmes. Yet innocent civilians like the Gallari men were locked away for years without trial. That is clearly a misplaced priority and a failure of justice,” Ibrahim said.

To prevent such cases in the future, Ibrahim called for an independent committee of inquiry involving civil society groups, non-governmental organisations, and other stakeholders.

“There must be transparency and accountability. If anyone is found guilty of aiding or abetting, they should face charges. But if there is insufficient evidence, then the person should be released immediately and compensated. That is the only way to restore public trust in the justice system,” Ibrahim noted.

After the story was published, the military released three and still holds two out of the 42 men. All the 37 died as a result of hardship and torture in detention after 12 years. the seocond developing story is published 22nd October, 2025. One year after, an impact.:

https://humanglemedia.com/what-happened-to-gallaris-42-men-after-12-years-in-military-detention/