Nigeria Soldiers Responsible For 8000 Prisoners' Death During The Fight Against Boko Haram.

Nigeria Soldiers

Amnesty international said the Nigeria’s military caused the deaths of more than 8,000 civilians in the battle against Boko Haram. They include about 1,200 who were the victims of extrajudicial executions since February 2012, and 7,000 who died of mistreatment in detention since March 2011, according to the report.

 Some starved to death. Others died of thirst or suffocated to death in poorly ventilated cells jammed with prisoners. And some died when soldiers fumigated the cells with mosquito poison, the report said.

Amnesty called for the investigation of senior commanders for possible war crimes, including murder, torture and enforced disappearances.

Amnesty International Secretary-General Salil Shetty said in a statement Wednesday said "The hundreds of unidentified bodies, the evidence of mass graves and the harrowing stories of starvation and abuse coming out of the country’s military barracks demand nothing less than an urgent investigation and for those responsible to be brought to justice,”.

The report was the product of a four-year investigation involving hundreds of leaked military documents and interviews with more than 400 witnesses, victims, doctors, senior military personnel and others, Amnesty.

According to the report, “senior officials of the Nigerian military had full knowledge of the arbitrary detentions and high rates of deaths and failure to take action to stop these human rights violations.”

One of the survival prisoners who shared his ordeal while in the prison said he was chained to another man and crammed into a 25-by-25-foot cell with about 400 detainees.

“They started to die after three days,” he told Amnesty. Only 11 out of the 121 men and boys with whom he was arrested survived the ordeal.

Another former detainee described drinking urine to survive because no water was provided.

he said, “even the urine at times you cannot get, any time we were denied water for two days, 300 died ... and whenever someone died, we were happy because of the extra space it will create.