Nigerian police carried out executions last year following the aftermath of the crackdown on a group in the northern part of the country, a video footage obtained by Al Jazeera appears to confirm.

The video recording shows how after the fighting of the outlawed Boko Haram group ended last year, the police went on a search rampage and took people out from their houses.

In the video shown on the Al Jazeera News Hour, several unarmed men are shot dead after they are told to lie down. As one of the officers shoots, another one is heard saying, “Shoot him in the chest not the head; I want his hat.” Another one is told to “sit properly [because] we want to take your picture.”

Reports from news agencies estimate that 1000 people were killed in July and August last year, during the government crackdown on Boko Haram, an Islamist group that went on a killing spree in the country’s northern parts.

Boko Haram, which means “Western education is prohibited” in the Hausa dialect, demanded that a puritan form of Islamic Sharia imposed in the country. This was seconded by their attacks on police buildings, officers and government officials using knives, machetes, bows and arrows.

It is after this that the Nigerian president Umaru Yar’Adua ordered the police to hunt down and penalize those responsible for these assaults. “They will be dealt with squarely and forthwith,” he is quoted to have said.

One of the alleged victims of these latest killings by the police is a respected community leader named as Baba Fugu Mohammed. His family told Al Jazeera that “he was killed” and that he “was shot by the police.”

Mohammed is said to have been the father-in-law of the Boko Haram leader Mohammed Yusuf, whose death Human Rights Watch described as “an extra-judicial killing.”

The Nigerian police have since asserted that Yusuf was killed while trying to escape, though the Al Jazeera footage showed his dead body still wearing the handcuffs in his hands.

It is not the first time international human rights organizations have accused the Nigerian police of shooting innocent civilians. In a report released on December 9, Amnesty International said that many murders by the police go uninvestigated and the officers unpunished.

The report titled “Killing at Will” revealed that “one of the main problems [with the Nigerian police force] is a rule known as ‘Nigeria Police Force Order 237’ – under which police officers are allowed to shoot suspects and detainees who attempt to escape or avoid arrest, whether or not they pose a threat to life.”

According to Erwin van der Borght, Amnesty’s African program director, this Order “simply gives police officers permission to shoot.”

He added: “It is against international standards, and is being abused by police officers to commit, justify, and cover up illegal killings.”

The government, police and the military have so far refused to accept responsibility that citizens have been killed. However, government officials have so far accepted that extra-judicial killings took place and that an inquiry was opened to investigate the killings.

“It was obvious [from] what we have seen and from the eye witnesses that the government police were doing the killings of the innocent,” Abubakar Umar Garda, a senator and a member of Nigeria’s ruling People’s Democratic party, told Al Jazeera.

“The government is investigating the incident and as we go along the perpetrators will be put in front of the law and the law will take its course,” he added.

Over the past four years, the Nigerian government has set up two committees to review the Nigeria Police Force, and submit recommendations to the government. However, these reforms have not been implemented.

Nevertheless, policing is not an easy job in Africa’s most populous nation. On average, estimates say that over 100 police officers die in shoot-outs with criminals every year.

Since the event’s occurrence in early February, seventeen Nigerian security officers are reported to have been arrested in the country’s north in connection with the series of extra-judicial killings caught on the video obtained by Al Jazeera.