Nigeria hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight Ogoni activists over oil-region protests, buried them without their families, and pardoned them 30 years later

Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People were convicted by a military tribunal of murdering four Ogoni chiefs. They maintained their innocence. They were hanged on 10 November 1995 at the prison in Port Harcourt. It took five attempts to hang Saro-Wiwa. The bodies were taken under armed guard to a public cemetery. Relatives were kept out, and no family burial rites were held. Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth. In 1996 Saro-Wiwa's son and a relative sued Shell in the United States, accusing it of complicity. Shell settled in 2009 for $15.5 million, which it called "humanitarian and legal fees." Most of the money went to lawyers and to a trust for Ogoni student scholarships. In July 2002 the family began exhuming the bodies, with Physicians for Human Rights helping to identify them by DNA. His brother, Owens Wiwa, located and buried Saro-Wiwa's remains in the summer of 2005, after about ten years of searching. A case by Ogoni widows against Shell in The Hague was dismissed. On 12 June 2025 President Bola Tinubu pardoned the nine, called them heroes and gave them national honours. His daughter Noo Saro-Wiwa said a pardon falls short of the exoneration the family seeks.