Nigeria military raids newspaper, seizes computers and arrests journalists

The Nigerian military stormed the headquarters and three satellite offices of one of the nation’s largest newspapers on Sunday, detaining at least two journalists and seizing computers, phones and other equipment.

The military released a statement calling its actions an “invitation” to talk to staff about a lead article on Sunday in the newspaper, Daily Trust, about a planned military operation in the town of Baga, that it said had divulged classified information, “thus undermining national security.”

The Sunday edition also included an editorial criticising the military for its lack of progress fighting Boko Haram, the Islamist terrorist group that has unleashed violence in the northeast of the country for nearly a decade.

The military raid came less than two months before scheduled presidential elections in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, and after a series of stinging losses in the war with Boko Haram.

Soldiers arrived Sunday afternoon at the Daily Trust office in Maiduguri, where Boko Haram was founded, and rounded up two journalists working there, Uthman Abubakar, a regional editor, and Ibrahim Sawab, a reporter who has worked in the past for The New York Times. The men were detained in a military barracks.

Sawab was released several hours later, but Abubakar remained in custody on Monday, colleagues said.

Later Sunday afternoon, armed soldiers in five vehicles stormed the paper’s main office in the capital, Abuja, and ordered journalists working inside to evacuate. They occupied the building for four hours, according to Mannir Dan-Ali, the paper’s editor-in-chief, ransacking the newsroom and carting away dozens of computers. Soldiers also entered the newspaper’s offices in Lagos and Kaduna.

In its statement, the military said, “The Nigerian Army has no intention of muzzling the press or jeopardising press freedom.” It added that the military would “not tolerate a situation where a publication would consistently side with terrorists and undermine our national institutions.”

Abubakar Ibrahim, features editor at the Daily Trust, was on the third floor of the newsroom in Abuja on Sunday when soldiers wearing bulletproof vests and carrying guns rushed inside.

“We’ve seen the military’s attitude to the population and how they can behave. That was playing in my mind,” he said. “Amongst us there was bafflement that something like this could happen in this age, supposedly in democratic society.”

© 2019 New York Times News Service