Mr Adewale Adeniyi, Commandant of Nigeria Customs Training and Doctrine Command, Gwagwalada, said his officers engaged the hoodlums that attacked the school in a four-hour dialogue before they struck.
Adeniyi, an Assistant Comptroller-General, disclosed this while conducting journalists round the premises to see the extent of damage on Friday.
He explained that they had noticed people on motorcycles who had come on surveillance to the command a day before the attack.
He said that on Tuesday, a day after breaking a warehouse in Gwagwalada to loot palliatives, the hoodlums came to the training command in search of palliatives.
“More than 4,000 of them laid siege in front of the command. We learnt about their arrival, we came out unarmed, we engaged them for four hours, we listened to them.
“They told us, they are in search of palliatives, that they are hungry and angry, and we told them it is a training school and there are no palliatives here.
“They insisted that there are warehouses behind our command, they even requested to get free passage to search for the warehouses, we obliged them but with a condition for them to bring four of them for the search while some officers will conduct them round.
“They went and discovered there was no warehouse around the training school, some of them decided to break our perimeter fencing and started shooting.
“At this point, we now realised that they came around to attack and harm us, so we responded swiftly to repel the attack,” he said.
The commandant said the command got support from security agencies like 176 Guard Brigade, the police and Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps.
He said some of the officers in the command were injured while some building blocks were affected.
Adeniyi disclosed that six persons had so far been arrested in connection with the attack.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that some bullet holes were noticed in some of the buildings in the training school. (NAN)
