Benue State Governor, Rev. Fr. Hyacinth Alia has said that bandits and terrorists wreaking havoc in the state have adopted guerrilla-style tactics that make them increasingly difficult to track and apprehend.
While addressing the recurring violence and killings in parts of the state on Focus Nigeria, a programme on African Independent Television on Tuesday, Alia said that the security challenge has become more complex, as attackers now hit and retreat without a trace.
He said: ‘We’re talking about the bandits and the terrorists who have come to a very mystifying frame of guerrilla warfare. They come, hit, and go back. So we cannot identify them’.
The governor said that the support of the Federal Government, particularly in intelligence gathering, is helping the state make progress in tracking down the perpetrators.
‘With the Federal Government’s continued support now through intelligence finding and searching, I think, we are going to do even some more.
‘We will identify those people, apprehend them, and create a new narrative for our three local governments and, in fact, the state’, he said.
Alia also linked the worsening insecurity to the internal crisis within the state chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC), saying the party has not been working in unity.
He explained: ‘There is another layer to the challenges we have in the state here. The non-cooperation of some so-called major stakeholders, the disunity and disharmony within the ruling APC camp in the state, is quite unfortunate.
‘There are some people who have been disgruntled and are yet to get back into the fold’.
He said that President Bola Tinubu has advised APC leaders in the state to resolve their differences for the sake of peace and development.
On Monday, the North Central Peace Advocates described the rising wave of violence in the state as a ‘politically motivated campaign of terror”, insisting that the perpetrators are not herders but “foreign-backed terrorists’.
In a statement, the group’s coordinator. Frank Utor alleged that hundreds of people had been killed and entire communities displaced in ‘a systematic effort to destabilise the and other parts of the North-Central.
‘The killings in Benue are not herder-farmer clashes. That narrative is false and dangerously misleading’, he said.
