The Edo state governor, Godwin Obaseki, has pleaded with police officers in the state to return to their duty posts and pledge to rebuild police stations burnt in the state.
Obaseki made the appeal on Monday in Benin City during a solidarity visit to the state police command headquarters.
He noted that police absence on the roads and some conspicuous places in the state could easily be interpreted by the hoodlums who hijacked the #EndSARS protest as weakness and cowardice on the part of the police.
According to him, those who burnt police stations and destroyed property in the state were criminals and should be treated as such.
“Edo State government will now proceed immediately to begin to rebuild your destroyed building. We already ordered some patrol vehicles and we hope it will be delivered in the next few weeks. We will responsible for the hospital bills of officers injured in the last few weeks,” he said.
The governor also restated his commitments to re-arresting all escapee inmates from the Benin and Oko Correctional Centres in the state.
“Every inmate that escape from our correctional centres will be arrested. Hoodlums burnt the centres thinking they have destroyed particulars of escapees but they don’t know that their biometrics were not within the centres,” he said.
Earlier, the state police commissioner, Johnson Kokumon, said 11 officers and men of the force were injured while over seven police stations were burnt during the protest.
He said the command arrested 126 criminal suspects, noting that out of the numbers 10 of the were the inmates who escaped from the Correctional Centres in the state.
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