In 1966, over fifty thousand Biafran men, women, and children were rounded up in several cities, towns and villages in Northern and Western Nigeria and slaughtered like chicken. Young girls were gang raped by scores of men and then corralled to leper colonies to be raped by lepers before being killed. Nursing mothers had their breasts cut off. Pregnant women first had their abdomen cut open; the foetuses yanked out and kicked like footballs before the babies were slaughtered. Men had gasoline poured on them then set ablaze to burn like bonfires. Several hundred thousand men and women were hacked, tortured, maimed, mouth slit open from ear to ear, limbs chopped off, eyes gouged out, and other types of unspeakable acts of brutality.
In all, over two million Igbo Biafran refugees ran back to their homeland in Eastern Nigeria as refugees.
Nigeria did this to the Igbo and other people of Eastern Nigeria in 1966. Most of the people who organized and supervised the perpetration of this crime have gone on to become Heads of State of Nigeria and have wined and dined with leaders of the free world. Satisfied that the world did not react to their heinous crimes against an innocent people, Nigeria’s leaders declared a war of genocide on Igbo Biafrans.
The Nigerian government completely blockaded Biafra by land, sea and air. Then, she went on to commit the worst genocide since World War 11, second only to the Jewish holocaust in its brutality, horror, inhumanity, and brazen barbarism. Top Nigerian government officials following in the footstep of Hitler, stated categorically as official Nigeria government policy, “starvation is a legitimate instrument of warfare.”Just as Hitler did to the Jews, the Nigerian government went on to starve to death millions of innocent Igbo Biafran babies, children, pregnant women, old men and women. The Nigerian government poisoned food, including baby’s milk with arsenic, cyanide and other poisons and smuggled these into Biafra territory. No one knows how many thousands of babies, children and adults were thus murdered, poisoned to death by the Nigeria government.
A report by a team of experts (chemist, microbiologist, pharmacist, micro-chemical analyst, and expert in forensic medicine) led by a United State Senator, Charles Goodell who visited Biafra and examined samples of food, confirmed that food items, especially salt, powdered and evaporated milk smuggled into Biafra by Nigeria, were poisoned with arsenic and cyanide (US congressional Record, 1969, P.4374.)
To maximize the number of Biafrans killed during this genocidal war, the Nigerian government instructed her pilots to target hospitals, open markets, refugee camps, children’s feeding centres, Churches, schools, and to bomb and strafe them without mercy. Again no one knows the exact number of Biafrans civilians who were killed in these genocidal bombings.
