Detainees Disappear Amid Nigerian Crackdown In an area of Nigeria where an Islamic insurgency has caught fire, security forces are carrying out night raids in residential neighborhoods and have arrested many people. No one knows where the detainees have wound up, whether they're in good health or even if they're still alive. Distraught relatives, human rights organizations and journalists have asked the army, the police, intelligence services and government officials where the arrested people are, to no avail. No one even knows, or is saying, how many people have been detained. Human rights monitors are deeply troubled that scores or possibly hundreds of detainees have gone missing in a country where security forces have a reputation for human rights abuses. The Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria has received "hundreds and hundreds, up to 3,000" calls from people across northern Nigeria complaining that loved ones have disappeared after being arrested by the military or police in the past three years, said Shehu Sani, an activist with the organization. Habiba Saadu's two sons and her daughter were taken on Aug. 3 by soldiers who went from house to house in a night raid in Maiduguri, accusing them of participating in the uprising by Boko Haram, an armed Islamic group that has been waging a bloody war in Africa's most populous nation for four years. Up to now, I have never seen my children! Saadu said. Visits to police stations, the army barracks, the intelligence services and local politicians gave no clue to the whereabouts of her children, Kundiri Muhammed, a 32-year-old kola nut trader, and Ka'adam Muhammed, a 29-year-old fuel seller and a daughter whom Saadu declined to name who is a high school student. Boko Haram - which means "Western education is forbidden" - is blamed for the deaths of more than 1,700 people since 2010. The sect has attacked Christian and Muslim clerics, government health workers and security forces, school teachers and students in its quest to overturn democracy and install strict Sharia law across this nation of more than 160 million people that has a mainly Muslim north and a predominantly Christian south. President Goodluck Jonathan declared a state of emergency on May 14 in the northeastern states of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe, giving a Joint Task Force of soldiers, police, intelligence and customs and immigration officials the right to detain people and move them from place to place, as well as the right to search without warrants. But even under the state of emergency, Nigeria's constitution dictates that anyone detained must have access to lawyers and family and must be brought before a magistrate within 48 hours, said lawyer Justine Ijeomah, executive director of the Human Rights, Social Development and Environmental Foundation. "Any other detention is incommunicado and is against the law," Ijeomah said. Even so, such disappearances are common, he said. Asked about people disappearing, Joint Task Force spokesman Lt. Col. Sagir Musa told The Associated Press only that "if they are arrested, then they are being held." In its half-year report published last month, Nigeria's federal prison service said it was holding 202 Boko Haram suspects by the end of June. Yet the military, the police and civilian vigilantes say they have arrested hundreds upon hundreds of suspects. Every day there are reports of people being detained. The disappearances of detainees began even before the state of emergency.