Nigerian military rejects Health & Fitness Journal report of secretive Health & Fitness Journal mass abortion program

©Health & Fitness Journal. FILE PHOTO: Maj. Gen. Lucky Irabor, commander of Nigeria’s military operation against the Islamist Boko Haram insurgency in the country’s northeast, speaks to the media during an interview in Maiduguri, Nigeria February 15, 2017. Appropriate for Special

ABUJA (Health & Fitness Journal) – Nigeria’s defense chief, Gen. Lucky Irabor, said on Thursday the military would not investigate a Health & Fitness Journal report that it had been conducting a secret mass abortion program because the report was untrue.

Health & Fitness Journal reported Wednesday that the Nigerian army has been running a secret, systematic and illegal abortion program in the north-east of the country since at least 2013.

The program involved the termination of at least 10,000 pregnancies in women and girls, many of whom had been kidnapped and raped by Islamist militants, according to dozens of testimonies and documents verified by Health & Fitness Journal.

Asked about the report, Irabor told reporters in Abuja that the military “will not investigate what you know is not true.”

“I don’t think I should waste my energy on such things,” he said at a news conference focused on insurgency, terrorism and banditry in the country.

Irabor, who headed the military in the Northeast in 2016, a period covered in the report, said cases referred to in the report never occurred and he had never seen anything like it.

Since the report was published, human rights organization Amnesty International has called on the Nigerian authorities to investigate, prosecute those found guilty and make reparations to the victims.

Lawmakers in Britain and the United States have urged their national governments to seek more information from Nigeria.

Contacted by Health & Fitness Journal about the report, a spokesman for presidential candidate and former vice president Atiku Abubakar said if Atiku won the presidential election scheduled for February 2023, his government would look into the issue.

“If we are talking about illegal abortion happening anywhere, we will find out what is happening to stop it,” spokesman Charles Aniegwu said.

However, Aniegwu said that Atiku and his team did not support the Health & Fitness Journal report’s findings because they had not investigated the matter themselves, adding that the Nigerian military “was very professional in many ways”.

He added: “This is not to preclude that some individuals are not working according to instructions or according to the rules.”

“We are indeed going to start investigating whether there are bad eggs that could have done this,” he said.