The United Nations is looking at ways to scale up the security of its staff and infrastructure in Nigeria following the recent attack on its headquarters in the country’s capital city, Abuja. The attack claimed the lives of at least 23 people and left 81 others wounded.
“As we carefully analyze where we spend our security money, we looked at this country as one with low or medium security threat. This is not the kind of country we expected this kind of attack,” Undersecretary-General for Safety and Security Gregory Starr said in a news conference in Abuja, as quoted by the Vanguard. “Over all, the security situation we believed to be low or medium grew to be incorrect, we need to take further measures in the future.”
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has also announced that the global body will conduct a global threat review in addition to a full review of the attack and security measures in Abuja.
>> UN to Conduct Global Threat Review in Light of Bombing in Nigeria
These announcements came as Nigeria’s State Security Service, or SSS, said it arrested two members of the radical Muslim group believed to have organized the car bombing. The group, locally known as Boko Haram, is said to have ties with the al-Qaida terrorist network.
The SSS added the arrested suspects have provided “valuable statements” regarding the attack, The Associated Press reports.
Some analysts, however, are cautious about the security service’s claim that they have caught two of the attack’s masterminds.
“The SSS are reported to have infiltrated Boko Haram to a fairly significant degree, so they may have managed to use intelligence gained from that to find people behind the bombing,” Reuters quotes Peter Sharwood-Smith of the risk consultancy firm Drum Cussac. “On the other hand, there’s no way of gauging the accuracy of the intelligence they are using, so we don’t yet know if they’ve picked up the right suspects.”
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