HOODLUMS have snatched ballot boxes at the Polling Unit 003, Dagiri community, Gwagwalada Area Council in Abuja.
The incident happened at about 1:00 pm on Saturday, February 25, as the Presidential and National Assembly election was ongoing.
The thugs also attacked two other polling centres at the Wazobia Park of Gwagwalada town.
The ICIR reporter visited the three polling units attacked by the thugs.
The polling centre at Dagiri is less than 500 metres away from those at Wazobia Park.
Many witnesses who spoke with The ICIR said two thugs, armed with cutlasses and knives, first came and scattered the centres.
They left and returned with more members when they could not successfully chase the people away during the first attack.
While they succeeded in snatching and going away with ballot boxes at Dagiri, they couldn’t go with those at Wazobia Park because the voters prevented them.
However, all the thugs escaped.
The ICIR learnt that the hoodlums attacked and broke the leg of one Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) officer at the Dagiri polling unit.
A few minutes after the attacks, a combined security team comprising the Army, Police, Immigration, NSCDC, Vehicle Inspection Officers (VIOs), Federal Road Safety Corps and others stormed the centres and appealed to raging crowds of voters.
They urged the voters to help them locate the residence of any of the hoodlums they could identify.
They also ensured that voting continued at Wazobia Park while they stayed with them.
Voters, mainly people from the South-East extraction, urged the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to allow them to recast their votes.
The ICIR reporter noted that all the Commission’s officials and party agents had vanished from the centre.
The ICIR saw damaged election materials, broken chairs and tables, and other things destroyed at the polling units.
The ICIR reported how FCT residents made panic fuel buying and searched for Naira on Friday.
According to INEC, there are 1,570,307 registered voters in the FCT. The number of PVC collected is 1476,451, giving 94.0 per cent of registered voters. The number of uncollected PVCs is 93,868, being 6.0 per cent of registered voters.
A total of 93,469,008 were registered for the poll, out of which 87,209,007 have collected their PVC.
Four leading presidential candidates are Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Labour Party’s Peter Obi, and Rabiu Kwankwanso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP).
Marcus bears the light, and he beams it everywhere. He's a good governance and decent society advocate. He's The ICIR Reporter of the Year 2022 and has been the organisation's News Editor since September 2023. Contact him via email @ [email protected]