The All Progressives Congress (APC) has described the Department of State Security (DSS) as an embarrassment to all intelligence-gathering organisations around the world. The party was reacting to the claims by the DSS that its findings after a December 2014 raid on the party’s data offices in Lagos unearthed evidence of attempts to hack into the data base of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) with a view to rigging the February 2015 polls.

APC in a statement issued late yesterday in Abuja by its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, described the ‘findings’ as a disservice to Nigeria and the timing of the release by DSS as a plot orchestrated in collusion with the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to distract the APC from its ongoing campaigns for the elections.

APC described as disingenuous, flimsy, premeditated, partisan and an irritant the conclusion that the party had an “articulated plan to inflate the party’s membership data as well as hack into INEC’s voter registration database through the creation of party membership forms and cards to match INEC’s voters register across the country.”

According to APC, “First the DSS and the PDP said the APC was cloning Permanent Voters Cards at the raided office, without a shred of evidence. Now, after a ‘painstaking’ investigation, the DSS has found out that the APC was only planning to inflate its membership data and then hack into INEC’s database. And this is the outcome of its massive, months-long investigations?

“This would have been funny if it were not from a primary domestic intelligence agency saddled with a great responsibility. Can this wishy-washy report stand any serious scrutiny? Can any serious intelligence gathering agency anywhere else in the world take this report seriously? With these kinds of findings, one can now understand why Boko Haram has continued to strike at times and places of its own choosing without any prior knowledge by our all-powerful DSS.

“Even the presentation of the report by a poorly-trained and highly-politicised spokesperson of the DSS worsened the so-called findings. Why would the spokesperson of a national agency sound like a megaphone for the ruling party, freely castigating the opposition spokesman and ‘a number of uninformed members of the public’? Why does she have to go personal in presenting a report that supposedly is in the national interest?

“We have always warned that our democracy is in clear and present danger, not just from desperate politicians, but also from institutions of state that have compromised in their roles and resorted to crass lawlessness. The DSS’ ‘findings’ today have given us another reason to repeat this warning.

“While we are willing to meet the DSS in court, we can confidently say that the ‘confessions’ extracted from the arrested persons, after they were subjected to incredible acts of torture, cannot even stand in any court of law.”

APC recalled that in its statement of December 5, 2014, it accused the DSS of resorting to the use of torture to obtain forced confessions from those who were arrested during the first raid on the party’s Data Centre in Ikeja.

The party said: “In that statement, we called the action of the DSS a contravention of the UN Convention against Torture to which Nigeria is a signatory and a violation of the citizens’ fundamental human rights.

“We also said the DSS shackled the hands and legs of those arrested and blindfolded them while they were being taken to Abuja. The arrested persons remained in chains even at the dark detention cell where they were made to sleep on the bare floor for the 10 days they were detained illegally.

“Guns were pointed at their heads by DSS personnel who threatened to shoot them, while a pregnant woman among those who were arrested was denied access to her drugs even when she started bleeding due to the torture to which she was subjected by the DSS. Now the DSS has confirmed what we said in that press statement. Is anyone still surprised at the action of countries that are distancing themselves from Nigeria over human rights violations?”

APC said the impending release of the ‘great findings’ by the DSS after its world class investigations must have been the reason why the agency recently threatened it would arrest any politician who makes inciting comments, adding: “Apparently the DSS needed to silence all so that no one will dare criticise its earth-shaking ‘findings’.”

•Photo shows APC Spokesman Lai Mohammed.

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