by Chijioke Anyacho
I came online around 1am on Saturday, November 21, 2015 and saw a notification that a friend made a comment on my post regarding the authenticity of a picture of decomposed bodies of soldiers making round social network as that of the bodies of our 105 missing Soldiers, his comment was a screenshot of a newspaper headline which reads “VANGUARD, Nigeria: 46 Soldiers perish in auto crash 23 MAY 2008”.
The screenshot had the same picture making rounds as that of our missing soldiers. I thanked him for sharing the screenshot then I downloaded the images to my phone. But upon studying the screenshot, I noticed something abnormal. The headline, “NIGERIA(emphasis mine): 46 soldiers perish in Auto crash”.
RELATED: 105 Soldiers, T-72 Tank Missing Following Fierce Battle With Boko Haram In Borno (DETAILS
ONE
Why would a Nigerian news media reporting an incident that happened in Nigeria, use the word NIGERIA as a prefix to the incident?? It’s absurd. You only do that when you are reporting an incident that happened in another country. Immediately I knew something was wrong about this screenshot.
Our news has never read “Nigeria: 23 killed by Boko Haram”. It only does so when it’s being reported from outside the country. Thank God for Google, immediately I set to work.
Search for “May 23 2008” on the Vanguard website was not successful as they couldn’t generate any information from their archive.
Also, search result for “Vanguard newspaper May 23 2006/8” on Google couldn’t find that paper or any link to it. Remember, I am dealing with a screenshot, which means it must have been created within the last 36 hours against the backdrop of the missing soldiers news.
This begs the first question,
Where did they get that news to screenshot? Definitely not from the Internet.
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TWO
I searched “46 Nigerian Soldiers perish in auto crash after returning from Darfur” on Google, while the date May, 2008 matched the accident, it will interest you to note that NO SINGLE NEWS CHANNEL THAT CARRIED THE NEWS OF THE ACCIDENT HAS ANY PICTURE OF DEAD/DECOMPOSED SOLDIERS ATTACHED TO IT.
Not even Fox News has any image with the news.
This can only mean one thing – the screenshot of “VANGUARD, Nigeria: 46 Soldiers perish in auto crash 23 MAY 2008“, being peddled in some quarters to debunk the picture of dead soldiers that is claimed to be that of our missing soldiers, IS A PHOTOSHOP.
They just took the picture in question and slotted it into an unrelated news in order to discredit the picture and deceive Nigerians. And the fact that the said screenshot originated from the APC camp on Social Network means that the APC is deliberately trying to deceive the Nigeria public and the world at large while trying to cover up the brutal killings of Nigerian soldiers by Boko Haram.
THREE
The Army uniform in the APC Vanguard Newspaper screenshot was not what the army was wearing to combat as at 2008. So it’s as stupid as, a 2008 newspaper with an advert for iPhone 6.
FOUR
The picture that is claimed to be bodies of the 105 soldiers reportedly missing IS NO WHERE ON THE INTERNET.
It is clear that there is a big conspiracy to cover up the killings of Nigeria Soldiers by the Boko Haram sect by the Nigeria Army (who has repeatedly issued contradictory statements regarding this attack), the Nigeria press and the APC.
The questions every Nigerian should be asking right now are:
How many cases of missing soldiers did not get reported?
How many of our soldiers have died without us hearing about it?
How many attacks on the army by Boko Haram has been covered up by authorities?
If Premium Times had not reported this news EXCLUSIVELY, would we have known it ever happened?
And finally, time has come for us to really ask ourselves and the government in power, what is really going on with the Nigerian Army in the North East of Nigeria fighting against the Boko Haram?
This deception must stop.
WHERE ARE OUR MISSING SOLDIERS?
Chijioke Anyacho is a social and political commentator. Connect with him on Facebook.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
