INEC office theft: Police yet to make arrest

The Lagos State Police Command has yet to arrest any suspect in the case of the 1,388 Direct Data Capturing machines and other equipment that were stolen from the Lagos office of the Independent National Electoral Commission.The Head, Public Affairs, INEC, Lagos, Femi Akinbiyi, told SUNDAY PUNCH that the police had been inviting members of staff for interrogation.He said, No arrest has been made. Investigators have been interrogating members of staff especially those in the Information Technology department and the store. For now, no suspect has been named.I heard the police are extending their investigation to other places but I dont have details about that.The Chief Press Secretary to the INEC chairman, Kayode Idowu, said the theft was first noticed on October 16, while the quantity of items involved was determined after an in-house audit concluded on October 24.In a statement issued in Abuja, Idowu said the stolen items included 1388 units out of the 9,450 units of DDC machines allocated to Lagos State for the voter registration exercise in January, Internal Hard Disks of 2986 units and batteries of another 644 units of the DDC machines.He added that the commission decided to make the theft public in line with its policy of transparency and allayed fears over the safety of data gathered with the machines that were stolen.He said, The data gathered with those machines will remain secure in the data bank. The hard disks have secure back-ups. Besides, all the data have been integrated in the Lagos State INEC servers as well as the servers at the national level.When our correspondent contacted the spokesman of the Lagos State Police Command, Samuel Jinadu, he said he would confirm and get back to SUNDAY PUNCH.He had yet to do that at the time of filing this report.
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