‘Why Warri witnessed peaceful celebration during Yuletide’

The Delta State Commissioner of Police, Ibrahim Zanna, has attributed the peaceful Yuletide celebration in Warri and its environs to the tireless effort of the Nigeria police and other sister security agencies.

Ibrahim disclosed this yesterday at the palace of the traditional ruler of Ogbe-Ijoh where two G3 rifles dispossessed from two immigration officers in Warri by militants along the Ogbe-Ijoh/Aladja River in Warri South West Local Government Area of the state were handed over to him by the monarch, Couple Oromoni, the Pete Ama-Okosu of Ogbe-Ijoh Warri kingdom.

Zanna who described as unprecedented, the recovery of the weapons, which were made possible with the intelligence gathering efforts to the community, stressed the need for a working conviviality between the police and communities, maintaining that community policing is the hallmark of every security network in the world today.

Receiving the rifles, Zanna who commended the Ogbe-Ijoh people, especially the monarch, for his commitment to the peaceful resolution of the conflict, appealed to other traditional rulers to emulate the rare feat of the Ogbe-Ijoh monarch, especially at this time of crisis between the Aladja and Ogbe-Ijoh communities.

He noted that a community that does not aspire for peace would have kept the weapons and use it to unleash mayhem on their perceived enemies, urged other communities in the state to emulate the commitment of the royal father, describing it as unprecedented.

The police boss also disclosed that as part of measures towards resolving the crisis, strictly complaint buffer zone areas as specified by the government, in addition to joint police and army check points in the communities and the approval for the establishment of Special Protection Unit (SPU) by the force headquarters in Abuja would soon be put in place.

Earlier, the traditional ruler told the police commissioner that when the news of the two missing weapons filtered into the community, he immediately summoned a meeting of his council of chiefs where the decision to send search parties into the community to retrieve the missing weapons was taken, consequent upon which the two G3 riffles were recovered.