NYT: Morgue overflowing as Nigeria's dirty war rages

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — A fresh load of battered corpses arrived, 29 of them in a routine delivery by the Nigerian military to the hospital morgue here.

Unexpectedly, three bodies started moving.

“They were not properly shot,” recalled a security official here. “I had to call the J.T.F.” — the military’s joint task force — “and they gunned them down.”

It was a rare oversight. Large numbers of bodies, sometimes more than 60 in a day, are being brought by the Nigerian military to the state hospital, according to government, health and security officials, hospital workers and human rights groups — the product of the military’s brutal war against radical Islamists rooted in this northern city.

The corpses were those of young men arrested in neighborhood sweeps by the military and taken to a barracks nearby. Accused, often on flimsy or no evidence, of being members or supporters of Boko Haram — the Islamist militant group waging a bloody insurgency against the Nigerian state — the detainees are beaten, starved, shot and even suffocated to death, say the officials, employees and witnesses.

Then, soldiers bring the bodies to the hospital and dump them at the morgue, officials and workers say. The flood is so consistent that the small morgue at the edge of the hospital grounds often has no room, with corpses flung by the military in the sand around it. Residents say they sometimes have to flee the neighborhood because of the fierce smell of rotting flesh.