TheCable

Idowu Owohunwa, Lagos state commissioner of police, says the purveyors of misinformation aimed at inciting people to cause unrest within Lagos will be fished out.

Owohunwa said residents of the state should disregard old videos of riots being circulated as current events going on in Lagos.

In a statement issued by Benjamin Hundeyin, the command’s spokesperson, on Monday, Owohunwa said the cybercrime unit of the command has been mandated to arrest “people behind this deliberate misinformation for immediate prosecution”.

“The good people and residents of Lagos state are urged to disregard all forms of messages, especially on social media depicting fictitious, fallacious, and divisive claims aimed at jeopardising the peace currently being enjoyed in the state,” he said.

“Once again, the command assures Lagosians that all human and operational resources at its disposal have been fully and optimally deployed, especially at vulnerable points, including major markets across the state to ensure a total forestalling of the breakdown of law and order in the state.”

The police statement comes amid growing cases of misinformation with the embellishment of ethnic profiling, shared online by faceless netizens.

This scaremongering and fake news intensified after Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the governor of the state, was announced as the winner of the March 18 governorship poll in the state.

Meanwhile, the Ohanaeze Ndigbo Worldwide, the apex Igbo socio-cultural group, had called on the federal government to look into the ethnic profiling of the Igbo in Lagos.