About 40 Lagos-bound travellers from Kano State have been intercepted in Niger.
This was contained in a statement signed on Wednesday night by Mary Noel-Berje, chief press secretary to Niger governor, Abubakar Bello, The PUNCH reports.
According to the statement, 19 other persons travelling from Lagos to Kano were also stopped by the state COVID-19 Task Force.
The state is one of the gateway states between the upper north and southern Nigeria.
President Muhammadu Buhari had on April 27, ordered a ban on non-essential inter-state passenger travel until further notice, as part of measures to curb the spread of the disease, which is said to be at the community transmission stage in the country.
“Despite the interstate lockdown, people are still moving under any small opportunity they got. I can’t imagine people travelling under the cover of trampoline and sack of rice.
“For us, we are not going to leave any stone unturned, they are going back to where they came from,” Niger State Health Commissioner, Muhammad Makusidi, was quoted in the statement.
The government said the intercepted persons have since been convicted by the mobile court, and charged to between three months and one-year imprisonment with an option of a fine.
Lagos, with 1491 COVID-19 cases, and Kano with 482 in latest figures according to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), have the highest number of infections in the country.
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