Nigeria's notoriously aggressive police killed 7,198...

Nigeria's notoriously aggressive police killed 7,198 suspected armed robbers since the start of the year 2000, the force announced at a news conference. Already, in the first two months of 2004 year, 422 robbers had been "killed in combat", according to a dossier of statistics given to journalists by Chief Inspector of the Nigerian police General Tafa Balogun. Since the turn of the Millennium a total of 25,397 armed robbery suspects had been arrested, he revealed, a figure which suggested that almost a quarter of the bandits who encountered the police ended up dead. Both Nigerian and international human rights groups regularly accused the police of overreacting to public order problems, firing indiscriminately and carrying out extra-judicial executions.