The Nigerian Army has said it is releasing the repentant Boko Haram fighters as a shift from the use of arms and as a soft approach to the war against insurgency in the Northeast.

Acting Defence Spokesman, Brig Onyema Nwachukwu, disclosed this yesterday, in an interview with newsmen in Abuja.

Nwachukwu was responding to fears by Nigerians and calls for suspension of rehabilitation of repentant Boko Haram members into the society. This was after about 1,400 ‘repentant’ Boko Haram suspects, who were in detention, were released and resettled back into the society by the Nigerian military

He explained that the initiative is only targeted at low-risk Boko Haram members, who were not captured during combat.

According to the Defence Spokesman: “In 2016, the Federal Government initiated Operation Safe Corridor (OSC) to de-radicalise repentant members of Boko Haram. It is not anything that is done haphazardly. The target audience is not those captured in combat. No!

“Those captured in combat are processed for prosecution, but the ones that have not been ideologically indoctrinated because they were conscripted; they were abducted are the ones being rehabilitated. They call them low-risk combatants. Those ones do not buy into Boko Haram agenda; they were forced into it. These repentant members have been assisting the military, by providing intelligence on Boko Haram’s activities…” he explained