MICHELLE FAUL
Associated Press Writer= JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Beware of police roadblocks in Nigeria: If you cannot pay a bribe, you can land up dead, according to an Amnesty International report published Wednesday.
It highlights a new danger in a country regularly denounced as one of the most corrupt in the world, where bribe-taking long has been a way for poorly paid government workers to make ends meet.
Nigeria's police force is poorly paid and trained, and short of essential tools including bulletproof vests, fuel, even paper and pens, Amnesty said. But there appears to be no shortage of the bullets its officers use to kill people they are supposed to protect, the report said.
"In a country where bribes guarantee safety, those who cannot afford to pay are at risk of being shot or tortured to death by the police," it said.
Emmanuel Ojukwu, the national police spokesman, told The Associated Press that "extrajudicial killing is not approved in Nigeria."
He said officers who use unlawful force are arrested, prosecuted and sanctioned. But he could not say how many officers have been dismissed or jailed.
Amnesty International said its research, conducted over three years, indicates officers suspected of unlawful killings are "sent on training" or transferred to other areas. It said there are few prosecutions and it condemned a "culture of impunity."
No one can say how many people are summarily killed by Nigerian police, but the report put it at hundreds each year.
"Many unlawful killings happen during police operations. In other cases, the police shoot and kill drivers who fail to pay them bribes at checkpoints," the report said. "Some are killed in the street because, as the police later claim, they are 'armed robbers'; others are killed after arrest, allegedly for attempting to escape. Many disappear in police custody and are likely to have been extrajudicially executed."
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