Over 70 percent of Kuje prison inmates are dangerous criminals – Dambazau

Lt. Gen. Abdulraman Dambazau (rtd), former chief of Army staff and ex-minister of interior has noted that more than 70 percent of inmates at the Kuje custodial centre are dangerous criminals who ought not to be in the facility.

Recall that terrorists in an audacious attack that lasted for about hours, freed 879 inmates from the facility on Tuesday night.

In an update on the situation, Umar Abubakar, NCoS spokesman, said a total of 879 inmates escaped from the facility, out of whom 443 have been recaptured.

Speaking in an interview on Channels TV on Wednesday, Dambazau noted it was wrong to mix up terrorists with politically exposed persons in the facility.

According to him some of the terrorists have been there for over a decade.

He said, “Over 70 percent of inmates are dangerous criminals but the Kuje prison is medium security. It is wrong to mix up terrorists with politically exposed persons, and ordinary suspects.”

The former army chief noted that he had set up a committee to determine how to prosecute the terrorists, but cannot say what happened to the report of the committee.

“We set up a committee that went round the prisons to profile the suspects to determine how to prosecute them because most of them had no information we could use to charge them to court. I don’t know what happened to the report of committee,” he said.

“The response time was a major failure by security agencies. The terrorists had been their for over a decade presumably undergoing deradicalisation. Our prisons are unsuitable and ill-equipped some over 100 years ago like the Port Harcourt prison.”

Also speaking, Mr. Burkati Bulama, a public affairs analyst and senior researcher in institute of defense, UK, said the incident is an attack on the security system in the country, which according to him, has completely collapsed.

“These people have been saying that they will come to rescue those people in several videos. The attackers did not fall from the sky: they moved from somewhere to the prisons with all their logistics without detection; carried out the operation for three hours and returned to their based uninterrupted,” he noted.

“It is clear that Boko Haram has become more dangerous because they now have cells everywhere, from where they now launch attacks. This year alone, they gave attacked Kogi four times, Taraba state, Yobe twice, etc. It is signal that nowhere in Nigeria is safe and they are spreading. We must develop a plan to deal with them.”