Before his arrest 12 years ago, Ahmadu Gujja was a strong man in his mid-20s and his family’s breadwinner. Life in Gallari, his village, was simple and fulfilling. He farmed, reared animals, and has supported his widowed mother and seven younger siblings since his father’s death.
Gallari is a community of the Shuwa Arab tribe in Konduga Local Government Area (LGA) of Borno State, northeastern Nigeria. The remote village lies along Damboa road, 28 km away from Maiduguri, the state’s capital, 12 km from the nearest military base, and 98 km away from Chibok LGA.
In 2014, a tragedy struck. For Gallari, it meant near extinction. For Ahmadu, it meant losing everything overnight. He had just married his second wife and was eagerly expecting the birth of a child from his first wife when the tragedy unfolded.
When HumAngle met Ahmadu, the weight of the memories of that day was almost unbearable. Blind now from injuries and neglect suffered in detention, he struggled through tears to recall what happened.
“I can never forget the day,” Ahmadu started.
On Thursday in April 2014, one week after the 276 school girls in Chibok were abducted by the infamous Boko Haram group, soldiers in a convoy with the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) drove past Gallari without incident. Villagers, including Ahmadu and his neighbour Abubakar, remember seeing them.
But the following morning, everything changed. Around 9 a.m., soldiers and CJTF members surrounded the village, herding men, women, and children into a square.
Ahmadu had barely woken. He was waiting for his wife to finish cooking and to heat water for his bath, a daily routine for Ahmadu before taking his herd to graze. Instead, he was stripped alongside 41 other men. Among them were two strangers, one from a neighbouring village who had come to the market, and another who cut trees for a living.
“They gathered everyone in the village. They asked if we were Boko Haram. We told them no, but they wanted us to say yes,” Ahmadu recalled.
The soldiers picked all 42 men, tortured them in front of their families, and hauled them away in military trucks to Dalwa, a nearby village. “Some had their ears cut off, others were stabbed. I myself was tied with ropes and beaten by soldiers and members of the CJTF,” Ahmadu recounted the horrors of that morning.
Before transporting them further, soldiers interrogated the men about the abducted Chibok girls, whether they had seen Boko Haram passing through or witnessed the girls being taken. “We told them we saw nothing, that we don’t know Boko Haram,” Ahmadu told HumAngle.
That same day, the men were moved to Giwa Barracks in Maiduguri. The conditions there were appalling, he recounted.
“The cell was very tight, with no good toilet. We could only defecate in a bucket. There was not enough water, and the food was not enough,” Ahmadu said, adding that their hands were tied tight from behind for as long as he could remember.
They were given pap in the morning, maize for lunch, and semovita at night. Soldiers continued to interrogate them, demanding that they confess to being Boko Haram members.
“We suffered to the extent that if we were hiding something, we would have confessed,” he said.
For one week, they endured torture, including being tied up and left under the scorching sun from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., given just a bottle of water and a biscuit. Within days, three of the men had died due to hardship, untreated injuries, and the unbearable living conditions.
Years of darkness
After a week at Giwa, 39 survivors from Gallari were flown with hundreds of other detainees to a military detention centre in Niger State, North Central Nigeria. The conditions there were even worse. Their clothes were stripped, and their trousers cut short. They were forced to sleep on bare floors. Water was scarce. It was simply depressing, Ahmadu recounted.
“They gave us water in a teacup, and it was not daily. Sometimes we spend a whole day without water. They gave us tea with bread, but without water, we couldn’t eat. Sometimes, we drank our urine,” he recounted.
The first year was especially deadly. Ahmadu said many detainees died from hunger and suffering. “We have witnessed several cases of dead bodies disposed of in the cell. I did not have the count, but many Gallari men died within that period,” Ahmadu told HumAngle.
It was in Niger that Ahmadu began to lose his sight, first from a head injury during interrogation, then from months in darkness. “They kept us in a cell for one year without seeing the sun. When they later brought us out, they told us to look at the sun. That was when my eyes began to hurt,” he recalled. “I first lost vision from the right eye, then one year later, I lost the vision of the left eye. Turning me completely blind in a protracted year.”
For years, he suffered without treatment. Doctors in the prison said they had no specialist, and he was denied access to outside care.
After six years in detention, a court declared Ahmadu and others innocent. But instead of being released immediately, they spent more years in detention.
“The court said we were not guilty, but we still stayed,” he said.
For more than 11 years, Ahmadu did not hear from his family. “I gave up because I had lost everything. I had stopped thinking about home because it only reminded me of memories I had missed and would never get back. I missed my two wives and the unborn child I left,” he said.
The isolation drove him to despair. At one point, he contemplated suicide. Ahmadu started shedding tears from the eyes he could no longer see with when he recalled the memories.
A shattered homecoming
In 2024, the detainees declared innocent were moved to Mallam Sidi, a rehabilitation centre in Gombe State in the country’s North East, where they underwent social reintegration activities. That same year, HumAngle compiled a list of the 42 men from Gallari who had been arrested and remained untraceable to their families. We submitted the list to the Nigerian army, asking for their whereabouts. HumAngle never heard back.
But in April 2025, Ahmadu and two brothers from Gallari — Mohammed and Hashim Garba — were freed and reunited with their families in Maiduguri. “Out of the 42 men from Gallari, only five survived. And out of the five, only three of us were released,” Ahmadu told HumAngle. “The other two, Maina Musa and Isa Usman, remain in custody, waiting for court hearings.”
The military transported them to the Maryam Abacha Hospital in Maiduguri. They were received by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which offered them food and asked about their problems. But no medical care was provided. The military then told them to call their families or find their own way home.
For Ahmadu, returning home after 12 years was devastating. His first wife, pregnant at the time of his arrest, had died with her unborn child from grief and trauma. “She was not eating; she vomited up any meal we made her to eat,” Ahmadu’s mother recalled.
His second wife had been abducted by Boko Haram, bore four children for a fighter before fleeing, and when she heard the news of Ahmadu, she tried to reunite with him. But he refused.
Since his release, Ahmadu has continued to suffer excruciating pain in his eyes and head. With no access to proper medical care, he relies only on the little drugs his mother can afford from local vendors, mostly painkillers that provide temporary relief but do not address his actual ailments.
Two months after his return, Ahmadu continues to live with deep trauma that affects his daily life. His mother, who had long lived with little hope of ever seeing her son again, was overjoyed at his release. In her happiness and out of concern for his condition, she quickly arranged a small wedding so that Ahmadu could have a companion to support him through the hardship of his blindness.
In June, three months after he was freed, Ahmadu married his new wife. Today, the couple depend largely on his ageing mother, who struggles to provide for them from the little income she makes selling dairy milk. “My biggest fear is for my younger ones. My mother is still the one caring for me,” Ahmadu lamented.
He lives in an unfinished building under thatch that barely gives them shelter. It’s the rainy season, and everywhere is leaking in the room when HumAngle visits his home. Now blind and dependent with no livelihood, Ahmadu lives in humiliation. “Whenever it rains, we cannot sleep because the roof leaks. Before, even our goats had better shelter than this,” he said quietly.
Ahmadu lives with trauma and the weight of a lost life. He longs for justice but fears causing unrest. “If I can get my rights without causing any riot in Nigeria, I will be glad. But I don’t want anything that will cause a problem. We need a lot of help; I need support to start a business so that I can take care of my new family,” he said.
The brothers’ ordeal
Like Ahmadu, Mohammed, 35, and Hashim, 32, were ordinary herders and farmers before the raid. Soldiers seized them alongside the other men of Gallari. Mohammed remembers the day clearly. He was sitting with his wife, about to eat, before taking his animals out to graze. Then soldiers in nearly 40 vehicles surrounded the village.
From Gallari to Dalwa, then Giwa Barracks, and finally Niger State, the Garba brothers lived through the same cycle of torture and despair as Ahmadu.
“My friend Dahiru died in my presence because of thirst,” Mohammed said. “We could go four days without water. Some of us even drank urine to survive. By the time the Red Cross came to bring carpets and water, 37 of our people had died.”
Hashim recalled how three men died from torture before his distraught eyes within a week at Giwa Barracks. He also watched his elder brother faint under the beatings. Mohammed’s left ear was cut off, his wrists and back etched with scars from where he had been tied. Hashim, too, bore the marks of restraint and filth, his skin discoloured from months without bathing.
When the International Committee of the Red Cross intervened, conditions improved slightly, but the damage was irreversible.
Although eventually declared innocent by the courts, Mohammed and Hashim remained imprisoned. “We were told to calm down, that someday we would be released. It took 11 years,” Mohammed recounted.
At the rehabilitation centre in Gombe, where they were finally transferred, the brothers heard devastating news from home. “I heard that my wife and unborn child had died. My father, too, had died,” Mohammad said quietly. “When we were captured, my wife was pregnant. She gave birth to a dead child because of the way they took us. Later, she also died.”
Hashim’s grief was different but just as heavy. “We came back with nothing,” he said.
“Even this phone I use was given to me by my mother. I feel shy when I see people I used to know as children, now grown up. Everything has changed while we were gone,” he said.
The brothers returned to find their family scattered and their property gone. Before his arrest, Mohammed owned about 30 cows and goats. His herd and even his house are now gone. “We only depend on our elder brother, who is taking care of our mother. We want to be self-reliant again,” Hashim said.
Both men carry lasting scars. Mohammed struggles with heart pain and breathing difficulties. Hashim still bears deep marks on his wrists and head.
“When we first came back, I couldn’t even walk to the toilet without help. I had to reduce how much water I drank just to avoid disturbing people every time,” he said.
But beyond the physical pain is the humiliation of starting life from nothing.
“We don’t want to be beggars. If I can have a wife, I can have someone to help me every day. But now, even marriage is far from us. Before, I married my wife with ₦100,000. Today, you need nearly a million. And I have nothing,” Mohammed said.
Upon release, Ahmadu, Mohammed, and Hashim told HumAngle that the authorities gave them ₦50,000 cash. “They wasted 12 years of our lives. How can we recover with ₦50,000? I exhausted the money two days after my release,” Mohammed told HumAngle.
‘When we saw them, we cried’
The release of Ahmadu and the Garba brothers broke years of silence but also reopened deep wounds, especially for families who have lost loved ones forever. “When we saw them, we cried. They were unrecognisable,” a relative told HumAngle.
Other locals, like Kellu Janga, spent everything they had chasing hopes of reunion. She turned to people who claimed they could help to secure the men’s release, but those efforts proved futile. Her grief eventually cost her her eyesight, and she now depends on her grandson Abubakar for survival.
“We need the government to tell us where the rest are. We need justice,” Modu, the village’s deputy head and the only man spared during the mass arrest, told HumAngle.
Gallari’s tragedy has remained invisible, overshadowed by global attention to other incidents like the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls that led to the raid. While the world mourned those girls, Gallari’s men vanished in silence. No official explanation has ever been given. The Nigerian Army has not responded to HumAngle’s letters seeking answers.
Children who were toddlers when their fathers were seized are now teenagers, growing up without fatherly support. Some dropped out of school to fend for themselves.
Abubakar, only ten when his father and uncles were taken, has carried the burden of raising his siblings ever since. “I just want to see my father again. If he is alive, let them bring him back. If not, we deserve to know,” he said.
‘A gross violation of the constitution’
In the North East, transitional justice has often focused on the reintegration of former Boko Haram members through initiatives such as the Disarmament, Demobilisation, Rehabilitation, and Reintegration Borno Model (DDRR) programme, a counter-terrorism project aimed at rehabilitating and reintegrating surrendered Boko Haram members back into society, and Sulhu, a local peace and deradicalisation initiative.
While these efforts aim to end violence and rebuild communities, they leave behind unresolved wounds for families whose loved ones were arrested arbitrarily and held without trial for years. For these families, justice is not about reintegration alone but also about truth, accountability, and the right to know the fate of those taken away.
Relatives of detainees interviewed by HumAngle argue that any conversation about reconciliation feels incomplete and one-sided when innocent civilians remain behind bars without trial. Their demand is simple: justice must include the release or fair trial of those held in military detention centres, alongside information about those who have died in custody.
For them, healing cannot come from dialogue with insurgents while their own sons, brothers, and fathers languish in silence and neglect.
Aisha, one of several individuals and groups in Borno State advocating for justice and the release of their loved ones, expressed the frustration shared by many. “How can we have Sulhu with Boko Haram members who were the cause of the mass arrests, detentions, and killings? Our children, sons, relatives, and parents have been detained without trial for many years, and you want us to accept Sulhu? Release our children if you want justice for all. Our children were innocent when the military arrested them,” she said.
Aisha’s activism began with seeking the release of her own son, arrested along with other youths in a mosque in 2012. Since then, she has become a prominent voice for families whose loved ones remain in military custody.
Sheriff Ibrahim, a lawyer and human rights activist in Maiduguri, described the detention of the Gallari men as “a gross violation of the Nigerian Constitution and international human rights law.” He explained that under Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution (as amended in 2011), no person should be detained for more than 24 hours or at most 48 hours without being charged in court.
“The law is clear. Anyone arrested should either be charged within that time frame or released on bail. To hold people for over 10 years without trial is unlawful and unconstitutional,” he said.
According to Ibrahim, the fundamental rights of the Gallari men and their families were completely violated. Chapter Four of the Constitution guarantees the right to life, the right to human dignity, and freedom of movement. “These men were presumed innocent but were treated as though they were guilty without evidence. Their families too suffered years of separation, uncertainty, and economic hardship,” he added.
He further noted that survivors and families of those who died in detention have the right to seek justice and compensation from the Nigerian state. “The victims, survivors, and their families can sue the government for unlawful and unjustified detention. There were no prior charges against them, no fair hearing, and no due process. These are the most basic rights guaranteed by law,” Ibrahim told HumAngle.
In contrast to the treatment of Boko Haram fighters and innocent civilians, Ibrahim criticised what he described as double standards in the Nigerian justice system. “Former Boko Haram members who committed crimes against humanity are reintegrated into society through government programmes. Yet innocent civilians like the Gallari men were locked away for years without trial. That is clearly a misplaced priority and a failure of justice,” Ibrahim said.
To prevent such cases in the future, Ibrahim called for an independent committee of inquiry involving civil society groups, non-governmental organisations, and other stakeholders.
“There must be transparency and accountability. If anyone is found guilty of aiding or abetting, they should face charges. But if there is insufficient evidence, then the person should be released immediately and compensated. That is the only way to restore public trust in the justice system,” Ibrahim noted.
This story was produced by HumAngle and co-published with other media.