Thirty-seven people were detained in an NSCDC cell in Minna last week. None of them had been brought before a court. All of them are dead.

On September 15 and 16, officers of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps raided suspected illegal gold mining sites in the Wushishi-Lukoto area west of Minna, Niger State’s capital. Niger State Governor Umaru Bago later said 67 people had been detained. By the early hours of September 17, 37 of them were dead, inside the cell. A video circulating online, reviewed by AFP, showed the bodies of dozens of young men, most of whom appeared to be teenagers. Their exact ages have not been officially confirmed.

No court appearance or charge sheet for any of the 37 has been reported publicly. Whatever the outcome of the allegations against them would have been, death in custody was not a lawful sentence for suspected illegal mining.

The NSCDC first said the deaths followed a suspected disease outbreak. It did not name the disease, and later said the actual cause had not been established and would require medical examination. Survivors describe something different. Dauda Shehu, one of the men who was detained and lived, told the Associated Press that around 65 people were packed into a cell with no ventilation. “We were jampacked and there was no ventilation for us to breathe well,” he said. “All of a sudden, we realized that we could not breathe and we started scrambling to get fresh air.” Separately, survivors told Interior Minister Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo during a Friday visit that something was sprayed into the cell shortly before people began collapsing. The NSCDC has not confirmed that claim. An intelligence report seen by AFP suggested overcrowding and poor ventilation were the likely cause instead of disease.

The numbers don’t fully agree either. Niger State’s government puts the toll at 37. Reuters journalists filmed 33 bodies laid out in a ward at Minna’s General Hospital, and the National Human Rights Commission has referred to “about 33” in its own statement. Public reporting has not yet explained the difference between the two figures. Governor Bago has said preliminary findings showed foam and bloodstains around some victims’ mouths and peeling skin, which he said raised the possibility of lead poisoning from the chemicals used in the mining itself. That is a possibility he raised, not a cause anyone has confirmed. The cause of death has not been established, and the circumstances remain under investigation.

What isn’t in dispute is what happened after. Anger over the deaths turned into protest in Minna on Thursday night, with residents describing youths attacking a transport authority office and smashing buses. By Friday, Reuters witnesses reported that security forces opened fire on demonstrators, some of them armed with sticks and machetes, as protesters tried to set fire to government buildings in the city’s Tunga neighbourhood. One miner among the crowd, Yusuf Auwal, told Reuters what he was actually protesting for. “We are not thieves,” he said. “We are simply seeking a way to make a living by mining.” Governor Bago declared a 24-hour curfew across Minna on Friday.

The response that followed moved fast. By Saturday, the federal government had suspended 20 NSCDC officers, including the Niger State commandant, and constituted a 10-member independent committee chaired by a retired DSS deputy director-general. Police and the National Human Rights Commission also opened their own inquiries. President Tinubu has directed an urgent federal investigation, saying that “the fact that these individuals were suspected of illegal mining does not remove their right to life, dignity and humane treatment,” and that his government “will not tolerate deaths arising from official negligence, abuse, dereliction of duty or the failure of public officials to protect lives placed under their care.”

What the public record shows so far is a system that discovered the scale of the problem only after people had died. The suspensions, the panels, and the presidential directive all came afterward.

This isn’t the first time Nigerian security custody has produced numbers like this, though the closest documented parallel is older and involves a different force entirely. In October 2013, Amnesty International reported that a senior Nigerian Army officer had told the organisation more than 950 people died in military custody in the first six months of that year alone, in facilities used to hold people suspected of Boko Haram links in Nigeria’s northeast. That was a different force, a different region, and a different conflict. It is not equivalent to what happened in Minna. What the two cases share is a pattern where a detention system was found, after the fact, to have let people die faster than anyone outside it noticed.

Mallam Abdullahi lost his son Salim, who he said had left home three days earlier to go mining. “They should tell us what truly killed our children,” he told reporters. “We need justice.” What killed his son, and 36 others, is still an open question. So is what it will take to answer it.