By YAHAYA ISAH

The Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, has tasked the nation’s security forces and para-military agencies to remain vigilant to defeat the criminal elements terrorising the country.

Aregbesola gave the charge in a statement by his Media Adviser, Mr Sola Fasure, on Tuesday in Abuja.

Fasure said that the minister gave the charge when he paid a surprise visit to the Kirikiri Maximum and Medium Security Custodial Centres in Kirikiri, Apapa, Lagos State.

“We must acknowledge our servicemen and security agencies, who have sacrificed a lot to make this possible.

"We must equally charge them to remain eternally vigilant and continuously evolve strategies. And to define these strategies, we have to make decisions based not on fear, but on hard-earned wisdom.

“I have also informed our officers and men here that they must fight to defend our institutions, territory and constitution. It also applies to all others wherever they are posted in Nigeria.

“The ragtag groups of opportunists must not be allowed to attack our institutions and get away with it. They must not live to tell the story.”

On the part of the Nigerian Correctional Service (NCoS), the minister directed that the management of the service should improve its efforts on intelligence gathering and acting on such information garnered.

This, he said, was the panacea to solving the problem of incessant custodial centres attacks.

“So far, no jail break by inmates has been successful, we have successfully quelled all of that.

“What we have reoccurring since the #EndSars protests of October 2020, has been a mass of people attacking our facilities from outside and setting the inmates free,” he said.

Aregbesola, however, directed the Controller-General of the NCoS, Haliru Nababa, to double his efforts on intelligence gathering to fortify and prevent breaches to the custodial centres beyond the use of arms and force.

The minister said that the country was on the path to totally defeating insurgents and other criminals ravaging the country, adding that many of them had been arrested, especially in the North-East.

“Today, a core of the criminal elements and insurgents across the country are on a path to defeat, they have been heavily degraded. Over 61,000 of them are in our custody in the North-East.

“Our assurance to Nigerians is that we shall rise above these challenges and emerge stronger and more resilient,” the minister assured. (NAN)

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