By Victoria Ojeme
ABUJA: The United Nations said yesterday that it plans to scale up the security threat status of its Nigerian personnel and infrastructure from low and medium security threat just as investigators from the America’s Federal Bureau of Investigations, FBI, as well as Nigerian security operatives are making every effort to get close circuit television footage of the attack.

At a News Conference in Abuja, United Nations Under-Secretary for Security, Gregory Starr said after a thorough review of Friday’s bombing in which at least 23 people have been confirmed dead, the UN would in future scale up security of its personnel and infrastructures in Nigeria.

According to him: “As we carefully analyse where we spend our security money, we looked at this country as one with low or medium security threat. This is not the kind of country we expected this kind of attack. We think that the security measures we took despite this heinous attack saved tremendous amount of lives. Over all, the security situation we believed to be low or medium grew to be in-correct, we need to take further measures in the future,” Starr added.

He stated that the UN would continue to take responsibilities for the safety of its personnel, working in concert with the host governments, saying, “we take the responsibility of the security of our personnel seriously, but like I said, it is a combination of what we get from the host government and the types of things that we do for ourselves.

“We look to our host government to provide our security over all. We support or reinforce host governments’ efforts with our internal efforts. Similarly the investigation that is being conducted is being done by the Nigerian government” Starr said.

The UN security chief also absolved the Nigerian security apparatus of blame in the attack, stressing that, extremist religious tendencies pose security challenges anywhere in the world.

Speaking on on-going investigations into the attack, Starr disclosed that efforts are in top gear to recover CCTV footage of the attack, saying, “they have asked the FBI to assist in any way they can. We did have CCTV cameras up. It is my understanding that the servers for CCTV cameras were close to the blast.

We are trying to recover the pictures from it, but it is really the responsibility of the Nigerian government and the FBI to recover these pictures. We typically do not release those images and the host countries typically don’t release such images,” he added.