Navy officers kill police men in Nigeria

Three Nigerian police officers have reportedly been killed after clashes with members of the navy in the south-eastern city of Calabar.

It is unclear what sparked the clashes but a senior police officer told the BBC that a police station had been set on fire.

One media report says that a policeman had confronted a navy officer for failing to stop at some traffic lights.

The police and the navy have not officially commented on the incident.

Images of burned cars and building were shared on the Nigeria police Facebook page but they have since been removed.

Another media report says that a navy officer who had been involved in a minor accident with a motorised rickshaw had been angered by the policeman's behaviour.

Shortly afterwards, a group of armed naval officers are said to have attacked and burnt down a local police station.

The BBC's Martin Patience in Lagos says the attack highlights the often lawless behaviour of the country's defence forces.

BBC

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Freed Chibok girls start rehabilitation in Abuja, Nigeria

Nigerian officials say the 82 young women released by Boko Haram extremists this month are now joining those already freed in a special rehabilitation program.

Aisha Alhassan, minister of women's affairs and social development, said Tuesday that the women will attend months of remedial studies. They will have doctors and nurses available to help them heal from the trauma of three years in captivity.

Some have criticized how the freed women have remained in Nigeria's capital instead of rejoining their families. But Alhassan says they are in Abuja "with their full consent."

The young women will not be returning to rural Chibok, where they were abducted from school in 2014. Officials say they will be placed in other schools in September.

Nearly 300 schoolgirls were seized in the mass abduction.

ABC

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Norway plans to digitize literature from Nigeria

The National Library of Norway said Monday it would digitise literature from Nigeria following a seemingly unprecedented agreement which organisers hope will lead to an “African digital library”.

In the northern Norwegian town of Mo i Rana, at the rim of the Arctic Circle, the National Library of Norway plans to digitise part of its Nigerian counterpart’s collection.

The library’s public division is located in the capital Oslo. “Our goal is for this project to serve as a model for other countries, and that we can help create a fully-fledged African digital library,” the Norwegian library’s director Aslak Sira Myhre said in a statement. 

The agreement, which is to be signed on June 10 in Abuja, will initially cover works written in the Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba languages, the library said. The costs will be shared, with the library in Nigeria responsible for collecting the works and the Norwegian one for carrying out the digitisation, with the transport covered by the Norwegian embassy in Nigeria. 

“The project has not been launched because the National Library wants to provide foreign development aid but because it enables us to enlarge our foreign language library, so this becomes a win-win project for us and Nigeria,” a spokeswoman for the Norwegian library, Nina Braein, told AFP. The National Library of Norway made headlines in 2014 when it announced it was putting virtually all Norwegian literature published before 2001 online and available free of charge, thanks to a pioneering agreement with rightsholders on the thorny issue of royalties. The digitisation of Norwegian works is expected to be completed this year.

Vanguard