The Defence Headquarters (DHQ), Abuja, has accused Reuters, a British international news agency, of attempt to blackmail the Nigerian military through what it described as “mercenary journalism”.
The Director, Defence Information, Maj.-Gen. Jimmy Akpor, disclosed this in a statement on Saturday in Abuja.
Akpor said the news outlet wrote that it was working on a series of stories about purported actions of the Nigerian military during the government’s 13-year war against Islamist insurgents in Nigeria’s North-East.
He said that Reuters had indicated to work on supposed stories that were purported to focus on supposed military-run programme of forced abortions performed on women and girls who were held captive and impregnated by Islamist militants.
The second, according to him, is a supposed killing of children by the military as part of counterinsurgency operations.
The Defence spokesman said that the Reuters report was to also allege that since 2013 Nigeria’s military had run a secret, systematic and illegal abortion programme in the country’s North-East terminating at least 12,000 pregnancies among women and girls.
