Nigerian army in cahoots with Israeli forces: Activist

Press TV has interviewed Shabbir Hassanally, an activist and Islamic scholar, to discuss the deadly attacks on Shia Muslims by Nigerian government troops in the northern city of Zaria.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: There are so many disturbing details of this case that one would not know where to begin. What are your feelings at this point?

Hassanally: I think at the moment the way the Nigerian military forces have acted, there is a taste that there is the hand of Zionism in this. It is a very bitter taste. You can see the sort of carnage that the military has done in Zaria. There is now this evidence of the mass graves they are doing and the hiding of the bodies and the removing of any evidence.

We know that, in Palestine, the Zionists do this as a matter of cost and it is well-known that the Nigerian military is in cahoots with the so-called Israeli IDF or as we call the Israeli occupation forces and MOSSAD.

So, it is extremely worrying. And I would like to echo the words of Massoud Shadjareh of IHRC (the Islamic Human Rights Commission), where he says that we have to apply as much pressure as is necessary and is required on the government of Nigeria to first of all rein in its rabid dog of an army and secondly give us evidence of Sheikh Zakzaky’s whereabouts, make sure that he is completely safe and receiving the best medical care, not just Sheikh Zakzaky but his family, all of the wounded and they need to account for every single soul that was murdered in those 29 hours of carnage and each and every one of those army people right down to the small privates, they need to be held to account; they need to be prosecuted and the relevant punishment, the relevant justice be brought down.

Anything short of this and what will happen is the same will be done by the Zionists in another country. There is Tanzania, there is Kenya, there is Ghana, there is all over Africa and the Zionists are all over Africa. We have seen…, when I spent time in Tanzania we knew that the Zionists were there. They have a huge base over there, which is called the US embassy and we know they are there. So the Zionist footprint on this is without any shadow of doubt.

Secondly, and this is a really important thing, there has been talk going on that this is a sectarian thing. There has been some people talking about Shia massacre, it is not a Shia massacre. This is a Muslim massacre, a massacre of Nigerians. The movement of Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky is known as the Islamic Movement of Nigeria. It is not a sectarian movement. To turn it into a sectarian event is to do disservice to it and to waste that pure blood that is being spilt.

So we need to be very, very clear. This is an Islamic movement. This is an attack on Islam, on Islamic people and on the people… the indigenous regular people of Nigeria of any religion because today it is the Muslims, it is the Islamic movement, tomorrow what is to stop the army from doing it to the Christians? At the end of the day, we know that Zionists are killing the Christians in occupied Palestine as well. This is nothing unknown. Of course we do not hear so much about it except on places like Press TV; but we know that the Zionists have no sort of…, there is no group that is sacrosanct. They even kill their own Jewish people, who they profess to be Jewish. They kill Jews who are against them. They kill anyone who is against them.

This cancerous entity called Zionism is the cause of this event, this blood that is being spilt in Zaria, the blood that is being spilt in Yemen, the blood that is being spilt all over.

This Boko Haram, this Daesh, all of these things, these are stratagems; these are strategies that have been given the guise of a group; and actually, there is strong evidence that Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky had evidence against this military that was going to blow it away, that was going to expose exactly what the truth is behind the military and Boko Haram and this is one of the reasons why they attacked him. Whether that is completely true or not I do not know, but I have heard this from one of our colleagues on the ground over there.