On Tuesday, 20th of October the Lagos state government called an impromptu lockdown to help disperse the peaceful protesters who have made the Lekki Tollgate and State House in Alausa their base of operations organising there every day to protest against SARS & Police brutality.
After the start of the curfew, around 7PM the army swarmed the peaceful protestors who were still gathered at the Lekki Toll Gate in protest. Shortly after, the street lights and the popular Billboard that lit up the Tollgate went off, making things pitch black then things became even darker. The army allegedly approach the protesters from the opposite end of the toll and fired directly at the crowd.
The Nigerian Army took to Twitter on October 21, 2020 denying every reports that it opened fire against peaceful protestors the previous day. Despite video footage from an office building overlooking the toll gate showing army officers approaching from the opposite ens of the site and firing into the crowd and live streams from accounts like DJ Switch. The army’s Facebook and Twitter accounts labeled several local and international publications reporting on the shooting as “fake news.”
In a report published by the Digital Forensic Research (DRF) Lab on Thursday, it noted that open-source evidence contradicted these denials. Using four videos, the DFRLab geolocated the shooting at the toll-gate “despite denials by the Nigerian military”.
“Several videos corroborate the location and presence of Nigerian soldiers at the Lekki Toll Plaza, a major toll highway toll concession in the south of Lagos,” said Jean Le Roux, the lab’s Research Associate for Southern Africa. Video footage posted on Twitter place Nigerian soldiers at the plaza, where they are seen approaching peaceful demonstrators and opening fire. Subsequent footage shows injured civilians being carried away from the same location.
A different video shows what appears to be soldiers of the Nigerian army approaching protesters where they were stationed behind plastic barriers. Soldiers approached the group and opened fire. No warning is heard in the video. Muzzle flashes indicate that several of the shots seen and heard here were fired into the air. It confirmed using features close to the toll-gate and across the channel that the video was taken “looking into a northern direction on the eastern part of the toll gate, suggesting that protesters were approached from both the east and west by law enforcement, as suggested by some witnesses.
Video footage also identified injured protestors at the same scene. The author of a video uploaded to Twitter on October 20 shows injured and bloodied protestors with the author claiming they were shot by soldiers. As the video pans, a parking garage to the south of the toll gate can be seen.
Another video taken in front of the toll gate showed several injured protestors being carried off in the presence of camouflaged soldiers, presumably the same soldiers seen in the second video above. At least two protestors are carried away, while a third is seen on the ground during the video.”
