HURIWA faulted the security strategy in the South East for the occurrence.

HURIWA regretted that armed attackers could target Senator Ifeanyi Ubah, insisting that no reason could be ruled out for the attack, including assassination.

The group said the investigators should thoroughly investigate to unravel the remote and immediate circumstances surrounding the dastardly criminal attempt on the lawmaker’s life and the slaughtering of a score of his personal and security aides including a passerby.

An unspecified number of police operatives were reportedly killed on Sunday at Enugwu-Ukwu community in Njikoka Local Government Area of Anambra State when suspected assailants opened fire on the convoy of Senator Ifeanyi Ubah.

Sources in the community, who did not want their names in print for security purposes, said when the gunmen opened fire, police operatives in the convoy responded and some of the policemen were gunned down in the shoot-out.

Speaking against the backdrops of the incident in a densely populated and obviously very busy junction in an urban area of Anambra State, HURIWA said there is no logic to explain that such an audacious violent attack can happen in such a place and it took ages for any sort of security intervention to arrive at the scene of the crime.

“For the mere fact that eye witnesses asserted that the violent assassination attempt took some time to play out, including a driver who said he was dissuaded from driving through the scene of the crime by eyewitnesses whilst it was still happening and the security agents only just arrived after the attackers had reportedly vanished into thin air shows that there is everything wrong with the security architecture of the South East region and the response time by armed security forces even when such crimes take place in urban centres.

“If we may ask, where were the military operatives that reportedly were deployed in the South East for special operation and why did it take such a long time for operatives of armed Security Services to reach the crime scene even when their men were also targeted?

“We think the heads of the security agencies in the South East need to go back to the drawing board and map out better, much more effective response mechanisms and even deploy preventive strategies more to curb the growing rate of sophisticated crime.

“The security operatives need not wait until the attackers have finished their job and disappeared before they now start running after violent killers who had since completed their dare devil tasks. The State governments in the South East need to spend money transparently to procure information technology tools for crime prevention and combats such as drones.”

HURIWA said it deeply empathizes and sympathises with Senator Ifeanyi Ubah and families of his assassinated aides including police operatives, attached to his convoy.

The group asked the Anambra state governor to lead the charge to bring together governors and stakeholders of Igbo origin to work out and implement common strategies to end the growing insecurity in the region.