A Finnish court of appeal has reduced the prison sentence of Simon Ekpa, the Biafra nation crusader, from six years to four years.
In a ruling on Thursday, the court upheld Ekpa’s convictions by a district court for participating in the activities of a terrorist group and publicly inciting people to commit crimes with terrorist intent.
Ekpa, 41, has been in custody since November 2024 when he was arrested by law enforcement in Finland.
He had appealed the September 2025 judgment of the Päijät-Häme district court, which sentenced him to six years in prison.
The prosecutors also appealed, seeking a harsher sentence.
The appeal court, however, reduced his sentence because the circumstances surrounding the offences closely resembled those in which grounds for exemption from criminal liability, such as civil war, self-defence and necessity, could apply.
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👉 JOIN GISTSMATE WHATSAPP CHANNELAccording to the appellate court’s statement, the district court accepted the prosecution’s case that Ekpa had acted from Finland as the supreme commander of several armed groups operating in south-eastern Nigeria.
The groups allegedly sought to establish an independent Biafran state, with members carrying out attacks on police stations, government buildings and military roadblocks to achieve that objective.
The court said it assessed the same evidence presented by prosecutors and reached the same conclusions as the district court regarding Ekpa’s activities.
During the appeal, however, Ekpa presented new evidence to support his argument that an internal armed conflict was ongoing in south-eastern Nigeria.
He argued that international humanitarian law should apply instead of Finland’s national terrorism laws because his activities were connected to the conflict and lacked terrorist intent.
The court examined the nature of the conflict, the organisation of the armed groups and the intensity of the fighting, comparing the evidence with legal assessments of the Balkan wars by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
It found that evidence of Nigerian government forces using heavy weapons, including armoured vehicles and combat helicopters, supported the argument that an internal armed conflict existed.
However, the court ruled that the fighting did not meet the legal threshold for a civil war.
Despite rejecting Ekpa’s argument that the conflict removed terrorist intent from his actions, the court considered the circumstances relevant to sentencing and reduced his prison term to four years.
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