There has been a series of bomb blasts in Maiduguri, killing over 117 people as of the last time a count was conducted, less than a week after President Buhari returned from yet another international trip to discuss how to defeat Boko Haram with foreign leaders.

There is no questions about President Buhari’s determination to defeat Boko Haram. A group he has condemned several times and believed to be behind an attempt on his life before he became president.

The effort of the various security services in the country is, however, questionable. It doesn’t appear like there is any effort on the part of the security services to put a stop to Boko Haram’s activities.

There is a reason why we don’t hear reports of weekly bomb blasts with multiple causalities from the US and the UK. It is because of the efficiency of their security services.

This is how an efficient security service would have dealt with the Boko Haram menace that has plagued the country for over half a decade:

Security services in civilised countries work on a tried and tested theory that human beings are creatures of habits. As human beings, we cannot afford to be arbitrary or random all the time as this will create chaos and anarchy.

Criminals especially have to be more careful, more meticulous and more disciplined than non-criminally minded people to avoid being caught so they adopt a strict code of conduct, a “modus operandi”, from which they mustn’t depart and this becomes a pattern for their operations.

A person without a criminal motive who is simply going about his business can afford to make a mistake, for example, you may take the wrong turn on your way to visit a friend for the first time. The moment you discover you have taken the wrong turn you simply turn around but a criminal fleeing from a crime scene cannot afford to make that kind of mistake. He carefully maps out his escape route before he commits the crime.

Therefore, criminals have to play by a certain rule book from which they mustn’t depart or else their criminal activities will be jeopardized.

This is what security services in civilized countries call a “pattern”. A pattern may provide a criminal with a sophisticated method to commit a crime but it also leaves clues for an efficient security service to work on.

There are certain factors which must always be present (or absent) before terrorists decide to attack a particular place.

For example, most attacks have been confined to a particular section of the country: this is an easily identifiable pattern.

An efficient security service would also observe the following: what time of the day the attacks occur; what day of the week the attacks occur; the interval between attacks; the distance between two different bomb blast sites and so on.

Even the victims of the bomb blast should be closely examined, the number of victims; the average age; the gender; the sort of gatherings they attack and every other thing they can think of.

These factors would not be studied in isolation but in conjunction with one another. For example, they may discover that they only attack a particular type of gathering on a particular day of the week at a particular time of the day.

After studying all these factors they will identify a pattern because human beings are creatures of habits and these terrorists are human beings, not spirits!

Once the pattern or “Modus Operandi” has been identified then the time and place of the next attack becomes more easily predictable and security services would be better prepared to prevent it.

There is a pattern to Boko Haram bombings, to put a stop to this national embarrassment, security agents need to study bomb blast sites and discover what that pattern is!

American Law enforcement agents say, “a criminal has to be lucky always but the Police only need to be lucky once”. Another way of putting it is, “It’s everyday for the thief but only one day for the owner”.

Let us consider another analogy: Hunters study animals and identify a pattern before laying their traps. A hunter who simply lays a trap without studying the animal he intends to catch will make no catch. Human beings are far more sophisticated and intelligent than animals so it is easier for a human being to study an animal than it is for an animal to study a human being.

Likewise, Boko Haram is a rag-tag terrorist organisation adopting crude guerrilla methods to attack innocent civilians surely they cannot be more sophisticated than an entire country that has the backing of some of the most powerful and richest nations on earth.

Apart from identifying a pattern, which is a strategy employed by civilised security services for every crime, security experts also say every bomb maker, like artists, has a signature – a unique characteristic that can be identified from the bomb blast. The type of bombs detonated by Boko Haram are crudely assembled and not bought from the market as a whole device therefore no two bomb makers assemble bombs the same way. Each would have a particular style of assembling his bomb, hence the signature. This signature can be identified from the fragments security services gather and reassemble after the blast. By now, Nigerian security agents should have a near accurate idea of how many bomb makers are in Boko Haram’s employ based on the number of identifiable signatures.

Also, bombs are made from certain common household material that are readily available for sale in the market. An efficient security service should have a comprehensive list of every single item that can be used to build a bomb and carefully monitor the supply and purchase of these items. Anybody buying any of these items in large quantities or a combination of the items must immediately be put under surveillance.

Armed with this sort of information, an efficient security service would be able to build what is called a profile on the perpetrators of these heinous crimes.

A profile would give them an idea of who they are looking for.

It’s obvious, however, that given the regularity of attacks by Boko Haram, Nigerian security services are not operating at the level of intelligence gathering needed to successfully fight the terrorist organisation despite the billions of dollars supposedly invested in it.

Sappyman:
Nice one.

adedayourt:

Rounakid:
J