expressing concern over the plans to criminalise the IMN, the Shiites said: “We have noted in the last few days the malicious suggestions linking IMN with terrorism and violence in several official quarters.”
Warn impostors against using IMN name
Members of the Shiites Islamic group, otherwise known as the Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN), have condemned alleged plans to link the Islamic body to terrorism, just as they dissociated themselves from any criminal activities across the country.
While expressing concern over the plans to criminalise the IMN, the Shiites said: “We have noted in the last few days the malicious suggestions linking IMN with terrorism and violence in several official quarters.”
In a statement yesterday, the spokesman, Mallam Ibrahim Musa, said that notable individuals, including a top government official in Kaduna State on a television programme recently, malevolently suggested that Sheikh Zakzaky and the movement are violent.
‘’He also spitefully used a derogatory word to describe our leader, with which he thought we would react and they would use that as a premise to unleash violence in our name.”
According to him, “yet another attempt at smearing our name was made last week in Kaduna and Lagos, when some paid thugs were sponsored to protest against freedom for Sheikh Zakzaky, linking him again with terrorism, which they have not been able to establish in any law court.”
Musa explained that the Islamic group has “reliably understood that there are some grand designs to carry out series of attacks and subsequently attribute same to the IMN having seen peaceful protests in Abuja last week on the occasion of 500 days of the detention of Sheikh Zakzaky incommunicado, without access to his lawyers or medical attention, the security apparatus earnestly desire through the use of two-faced machination of the enemy pretending to be working to free our leader while in fact they mean evil.”
He said: “they have concluded plans to infiltrate our programs and spur violence in order to swing public opinion against the IMN and justify the continued detention of Sheikh Zakzaky and their genocide.
“We wish to however categorically dissociate the Movement with any form of violence whatsoever. The Movement has never employed violence in its entire four decades of existence. It is on record that the Islamic Movement in Nigeria has never breached any peace even on provocation.
“IMN is not and will not be responsible for any breach of peace or violence that will result from any false-flag plots. We will continue to employ all lawful, legal and constitutional means to achieve our goals, and would not be blackmailed into submission or surrender.”
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