When armed individuals in police uniforms showed up to Elekahia Primary School in Port Harcourt City Local Government on Saturday, officials of the Rivers State Independent Electoral Commission and voters fled for their lives in fear of being shot at and having their election materials taken.<\/p>\n
After being sighted approaching the location from Elekahia Road, about 21 Hilux Patrol Vans with heavily armed men were seen firing multiple tear gas canisters. As the operatives drove them out of the entrance, the RSIEC personnel who had made their position to start accreditation in Ward 19, which has ten units, scrambled for safety.<\/p>\n
One of the armed men harassed an INEC official saying, \u201cCome here, remove that vest. What are you doing here?\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition, the masked and armed individuals demanded that the officials take off their vests and give them to them while making sure that all election-related items were removed and more tear gas was released.<\/p>\n
In addition, the armed guys fired tear gas canisters right into the mass of people fleeing for their lives. In Elekahia, as residents and those who had come out to vote ran erratically, one of the armed men shot another round of tear gas at onlookers at the entrance to Ibe Street.<\/p>\n
Many of the RSIEC officials, voters and residents of the community ran into Ibe and Boms Streets in the Elekahia community in a confused manner, thereby creating tension in the area, as several police patrol vans sped out of the area with many election materials.<\/span><\/p>\n When contacted, the spokesperson for the State Police Command, Grace Iringe-Koko, said she was not aware of the incident.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not aware. You are just telling me now\u201d, she stated tersely.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When armed individuals in police uniforms showed up to Elekahia Primary School in Port Harcourt City Local Government on Saturday, officials of the Rivers State Independent Electoral Commission and voters fled for their lives in fear of being shot at and having their election materials taken. After being sighted approaching the location from Elekahia Road, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":50807,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[186],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50931"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50933,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50931\/revisions\/50933"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}