Abortion Clinics: Reuters Is Complicit – HURIWA Says

Civil rights advocacy group on the aegis of Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), has said that the United Kingdom-based international media outfit, Reuters, has an agenda of destroying the Nigerian military’s anti-terror war with its skewed abortion report in Nigeria’s North-East.

It particularly described as misleading and malicious, the report by Reuters, saying that it is fanning the embers of hatred against the Nigerian Army and peddling false or exaggerated accusations supposedly to weaken the military and help arms supplies to sell more weapons to terrorists.

HURIWA in a statement by its National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, noted that the editors of the news service are complicit by keeping a purported secret and illegal abortion programme in the terror-torn North-East zone since 2013.

He therefore called for the arrest and prosecution of the editors of Reuters by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes.

Onwubiko said that rather than rope in the Nigerian Army, it is on record that a UK-based NGO, Marie Stopes International Organisation Nigeria confessed that it averted unintended pregnancies in 59,452 women in Borno between 2021 and the first quarter of 2022.

According to HURIWA; “Reuters is complicitous to have generated a report about what it calls abortion clinics in North East since 2013 but kept it to itself meaning that it should be prosecuted by ICC. Editors of Reuters should be arrested and prosecuted by ICC for hiding information about these crimes against humanity which may have been committed by this NGO and not Nigeria Army.

“Reuters has agenda to destroy Nigeria’s war on terror by peddling the totally disjointed allegations against the Army when it is even a public knowledge that a certain UK based NGO may even be the one clandestinely running abortion programme under the guise of providing women with reproductive rights related services in the North East.

“The Nigerian Army knows nothing about the abortion clinics based on the affirmation of the UK-based NGO aforementioned. The NGO may have committed unapproved abortion services for which Reuters is attempting to rope around the neck of Nigerian Army for some ulterior motives. Reuters should publish an apology to the Nigerian Army for such distortion of truth,” it said.