By the time the pogrom ended, virtually all Igbos of the North were dead, hiding among sympathetic Northerners or on their way to the Eastern region.
[citation needed] With the exception of a few Northern Nigerians (mainly army officers who were not convinced that Igbo were innately evil),[9] the Southern and Eastern Nigerians were generally regarded at the time in the North of Nigeria as described by Charles Keil: The Igbo and their ilk...vermin and snakes to trod underfoot...dogs to be killed.
Professor Murray Last, a scholar and historian living in the city of Zaria at the time, recounts his experience:And the day after the coup – January 16th 1966 – there was initially so much open relief on the ABU campus that it shocked me.
Hearing the Hausa men tell among themselves each evening of the insults they had heard from Igbos that day showed me vividly how the initial relief at the coup had transformed into fury.
The Ironsi regime was also perceived to have been favoring Southern Nigerians in the appointment to key positions in government, thus heightening the inter-ethnic rivalries.
[14] The failure of the Ironsi regime to execute the army mutineers responsible for the January 1966 coup further exacerbated the situation.
This has been criticized as an irresponsible and for a journalist unprofessional, self-fulfilling prophecy which would lead the Northern elite to assume that the Financial Times was in possession of information that they were not aware of, and that the world expected the North to react in this way.
[14] Later tactics were engineered by Northern elites to provoke violence such as fabricated news stories submitted to radio Cotonou and relayed by the Hausa service of the BBC detailing exaggerated attacks against Northerners in the East, which led to the furious killings of Eastern Nigerians on 29 September 1966.
It also was the precursor to Ojukwu's declaration of Eastern Nigeria's secession from the federation as the Republic of Biafra, and the resulting Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970)