Suspected thugs have attacked the House of Representatives collation centre for Bogoro/Dass/Tafawa Balewa Constituency in Bununu town in Bauchi State.
It was gathered that several people were injured and more than 10 vehicles were affected, most of which belonged to members of the ruling party, People’s Democratic Party, PDP.
A former Senior Special Assistant on Media to Yakubu Dogara, the immediate past Speaker of the House of Representatives, Iliya Habila made this known in an interview with journalists on Friday.
Habila said he narrowly escaped being lynched by the thugs who were very armed.
The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC had announced the candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Ja’afar Leko, as the winner of the election ahead of that of the PDP, Kefas Magaji.
Leko is being backed by Dogara who is representing the area at the green chamber for the fourth time.
“As a supporter of the PDP and one of the key supporters of Kefas Magaji, we were there to witness the collation of results, suddenly, we saw thugs in trucks being brought to Bununu.
“We were surprised how the collation centre was transferred from Zwall to Bununu. Then later in the evening, we knew that obviously the reason behind it (transfer of the collation centre) was to cause confusion and then allow them to perpetrate the evil they had.
“For hours, they held the electoral officials to ransom, for hours, they held security agencies to ransom and within a corner, a primary school, which they condone off and they were perpetrating that kind of evil.
“In fact, it took the intervention of military personnel to go and bring out the concocted results. They started unleashing terror on everybody that was perceived not to be with them. I also escaped by the whiskers.
“When most of our supporters had been driven away, they knew that it was a fertile ground for them to announce the concocted results they had. In fact, it was around 1am that they announced the results on Monday in a very nocturnal way and this is not acceptable. We were robbed of this victory, he was supposed to have been announced the winner, but it was a broad daylight robbery,” he said
The PDP candidate, a former Special Adviser on Legal Matters to the Bauchi State Governor has rejected the result of the election, saying that he would recover his mandate in the court.