Professor Charles Soludo, the governor of Anambra State, said on Sunday that all of the gunmen who have been caught terrorizing parts of the state are Igbos.
Gunmen recently caused a lot of fear in the South-East by shooting at residents, security workers, and public buildings.
Most of the attacks have been linked to the banned Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and its violent wing, the Eastern Security Network (ESN).
Soludo said that Igbo people are the ones who commit crimes in the state in an interview with Channels TV’s Politics Today on Sunday.
Also, the former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria said that, contrary to what most people think, criminals are both known and not unknown because the media often writes about them.
“Let me be clear about this: everyone we’ve caught is an Igbo. It’s not like people are coming from somewhere else to take over. It’s all Igbos against Igbos, and that’s the truth,” the governor said.
“The first people we caught were all Igbos from other states in the southeast, but none of them were from Anambra.
“But as we went on, we found out that a lot of the young people who had been taken to these bushes and taught and initiated in all of these things were also from Anambra state or were born there.”
Before Professor Soludo took over as leader of the state, people in Anambra lived in fear because there was almost always a report of an attack every week.
Sunday, he told Channels Television that security has gotten a lot better, which he said was thanks to the work of the security forces.
“Given how things were when we got there, we can’t say that Anambra is completely safe… But everyone in Anambra, all 8.5 million people who live there, can tell you that insecurity has gone down to almost nothing.
“Here, fifteen camps run by gunmen have been wiped out. Even on Saturday, some of the places where they were gathering were destroyed. “We have destroyed their infrastructure, and I don’t think they’ll be able to come back with the same level of violence they had before,” he said.