The Kaduna State Emergency Management Agency has said efforts are being made to determine those missing from the recent attack on the Abuja-Kaduna rail line.
Earlier, the state’s Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, Samuel Aruwan, said the manifest showed that 398 people bought tickets for the trip but 362 of these passengers were validated as having boarded the train through the gate. This was in contrast to reports that more than 900 people boarded the train before it was attacked on Monday leading to about nine deaths and several injuries.
While many of the passengers are still unaccounted for, the Executive Secretary of the agency, Muhammed Mukaddas, told Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily that there are concerted efforts to identify those missing following the attack.
“As I did mention earlier on, we have received up to 108 calls from people calling to know the whereabouts of their family members,” he said during the breakfast show.
“We have been able to cross-match only nine of the names provided by the callers with what is validated on the manifest. So, we are still in the process of trying to determine who is missing from the data that we have. ”
Mukaddas also rued the impact of fake news, insisting “the official data we have received from the Nigeria Railway Corporation (NRC) that has been validated is 390 and 360”.
The recent attack has drawn widespread condemnation and comments from within and outside the country.
Governors under the aegis of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum in their reaction to the incident, described it as “a horror dream orchestrated by the wicked merchants of death that we must all wake up from to address”.
“This is one attack too many. It must stop. First, as leaders, we owe the victims and their relations an apology as these unwarranted acts of violence are becoming too regular and they basically question our collective capacity to govern,” the NGF said in the statement signed by its chairman, Kayode Fayemi, on Wednesday.