A Nigerian judicial panel on Thursday condemned the deadly shooting at a toll gate in Lagos, the West African country’s commercial capital, in which 10 people were killed.
The panel said the shooting was a “massacre.”
The panel was created by Nigeria’s Supreme Court to investigate the death toll and overall performance of the state judicial system.
“The panel will make a thorough appraisal of the issues pertaining to the killings as well as recommendation necessary remedies so as to curb future occurrences of this nature,” the panel’s chairman, Justice Maryam Aloma Mukhtar, said Thursday in Abuja, the nation’s capital.
Lagos State Police Commissioner Umar Manko told CNN earlier this week that “the toll gate is purely a military area.”
He said four soldiers and one police officer were killed and as many as seven others were injured in the shooting.
Alhaji Azeez Shitta-Bey, a Lagos community leader, told CNN that soldiers shot indiscriminately at the crowd, killing a policeman and four others.
“We are demanding that their (forces) barracks in the area be demolished. You cannot police this place with regular police,” Shitta-Bey said.
Shitta-Bey told CNN he believes the toll gate shoot-out was a cover-up and the scene was deliberately politicized.
Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi, on Monday called on the military and state government to quickly identify and bring to justice those responsible for the deaths.
The court also investigated the shooting of Adamawa and Nasarawa State National Assembly members last week.
In both cases, gunmen opened fire on lawmakers leaving a security briefing.
Neither lawmaker was shot, but both officials were wounded by shrapnel.
In Yobe State, five people were wounded by gunmen shooting from a marketplace this week, authorities said. Two gunmen were killed in the attack.