Alleged secret burial of soldiers: Don’t dramatise Wall Street Journal report, Group tells Atiku

Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the last general election, has been accused of dramatising the story on the alleged secret burial of slain military personnel on Wall Street Journal.

The publication had said over 1000 soldiers killed in the fight against insurgency were secretly buried, an allegation the military authorities denied.

But Abubakar challenged the government of President Muhammadu Buhari to set up a panel of inquiry.

However, Bolaji Abdulkadir, secretary-general of NDF, told reporters that Atiku was trying to incite the public through the report.

He asked the PDP presidential candidate to “find a productive job and stop going about parading himself as Nigeria’s parallel president” just like the presidency has warned him.

“The National Democratic Front (NDF) would have ignored this piece from the Wall Street Journal but it continued the tradition of demonizing everything about Nigeria. It is therefore pertinent to react to this attack against our fatherland,” he said.

“An additional reason to question the intent of the report is the series of events that followed its release. Two of these events stood out: first is the rush with which Atiku Abubakar issued a personal statement that was almost as long as the report, the second is the coordinated promotion of the report on the social media handles of Atiku loyalists and those of social media influencers that had been on his payroll for some time now.

“NDF, however, wants to strongly advise Atiku to stop chasing shadows over the Wall Street Journal report dramatizing the killing of Nigerian soldiers while touting a well-known military cemetery as secret graves.

“The PDP candidate will do well to recall his words and actions before and during the elections. We see his empathy is another attempt to engineer and incite troops to be disobedient to constituted authorities. This too can be proven with Atiku’s track record in the recent past when called on the troops and officers of the Nigerian Army to disregard lawful commands by the Commander-in- Chief because carrying out those orders prevented him from rigging the elections.”