Criminals from Italy, the Republic of Ireland and a couple of other countries on the red list of the International Police (INTERPOL) were arrested at Nigerian airports.
The Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, revealed this on Tuesday, saying the criminals were declared wanted by European countries.
He said they were arrested within two days at the point of entering the country, adding that they were arrested due to the heavy investment in surveillance and intelligence-gathering equipment at the nation’s border points.
Tunji-Ojo who was speaking at a regional workshop on Maritime Border Security titled “Regional Maritime Border Security in the Context of Counter Terrorism in the Gulf of Guinea,” in Lagos State, said “these people would have come into Nigeria 18 years ago, but now we know that in terms of our air terminals, they are in sync because it’s integrated into the central system,” he stated.
He said Nigeria, for the first time, has Advanced Passenger Information (API) used to profile passengers coming into the country, adding that the API was used to query the passengers’ records, antecedents and travel history.
“Now, we can tell you that Nigeria now has an API solution. We never had that before now. Before now, we were one of the few countries without an API solution, without the opportunity for our Immigration officers to pre-profile people coming into Nigeria, not being able to query their background, query their record system, query their antecedents and their travel history.
“We never had that capacity before President Bola Tinubu came on board, but today, I tell you, NIS has that, so if you’re coming into Nigeria today, before you come, we know everything about you.
“We’ve queried you, we know where you’re coming from, and we can tell from their aspect, we’re now fulfilling our international obligations to our international colleagues by being able to uphold the tenets of UN resolution of the API solution that we have at the moment,” he stated.
