Shiites accuse Kaduna government of demolishing home of El-Zakzaky’s mother
The Islamic Movement of Nigeria on Thursday accused the Kaduna State government of demolishing the home of Hajiya Hari Jamo, mother of Sheikh Ibraheem Zakzaky.
The group also accused the state government of one of its religious centres, the Fudiyyah Islamic Centre.
Pictures posted on the group’s website showed the alleged demolition of the buildings.
The pictures showed the buildings before and after its demolition with hundreds of onlookers on the scene.
The Kaduna State government has yet to react to the claims.
Since the conflict between members of the movement and the Nigerian Army in Zaria on December 12, which lefts many dead, the group has accused Governor Nasir El-Rufai and the state government of bias towards it.
In a broadcast, a few days after the clash, the governor accused the Islamic Movement of Nigeria of illegally occupying federal roads and schools, disrupting academic activities, among other things.
He also said the Husainiyah building, which was the headquarters of the movement “was put up without statutory title to the land, and in outright defiance of a stop-work notice issued by the Kaduna State Urban Planning and Development Authority”.
Although the governor said the loss of lives were needless, he also accused the group of acting like a parallel state.
The movement, however, accused the governor of “desperately struggling to find an excuse to justify the massacre” of its members without recourse to due process of the law.
“All these simply show that the attack was pre-planned and premeditated,” it said, adding it was clear that the “governor is more like an extremist anti-Shi’ite governor and not a state governor”.
The Nigerian Army has argued that it shot and killed members of the group to repel an attack on the Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Tukur Buratai. It also reported the incident to the National Human Rights Commission, which has set up a panel to investigate the incident.
There has been conflicting reports on the number of people killed in the clash.
The Human Rights Watch on Wednesday stated that hundreds of Shi’ite Muslims were killed by soldiers and buried in mass graves in an “unjustified” attack earlier this month.
The New York-based rights watchdog claimed in a statement that soldiers killed “at least 300” members of the radical Islamic Movement of Nigeria earlier in December when they fired “without any provocation.”
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