'Dasuki staged a coup against Buhari during election' - Presidential spokesman said

The Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, has revealed that former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki staged a coup d’etat against President Muhammadu Buhari during the Presidential election.

Speaking at the RED Summit on Thursday, October 15, in Lagos, Shehu recounted how armed policemen in several vehicles with tinted windows stormed his home having heard that the All Progressives Congress (APC) was going to run a story in the media, revealing Dasuki's coup plans.

“The day there was a security siege at my home, I woke up to see that my house had been surrounded by armed policemen in the course of the campaign

“In fact it was the cocking of their guns that roused me and my family members from sleep. Only to discover that tens of policemen, police vehicles, and some other unidentified vehicles darkened the windows around my home," Shehu said.

He said, “The first thing I did was to say ‘Who will help me out of this situation?’ I needed to expose what was going on, and the‎ first man I reached was Adebola Williams of Statecraft. Adebola began to announce on Facebook and Twitter from that moment until the security elements realized that the whole world was looking at what they were doing, because I remained indoors throughout the siege.

“Of course it was much later that we came to know why they had come. Even the APC Presidential Campaign was penetrated by fifth columnists, and I will make this confession, because a day before that siege we had had a meeting with the security committee at which we agreed that we were going to run a story announcing that the National Security Adviser at that time, Mr. Sambo Dasuki, was staging a second coup d’etat against Muhammadu Buhari.

“This time around, all the things that followed, the postponement of the election on account of this and that and a lot of the thinking of the campaign was that this was yet another coup being hatched by the National Security Adviser and we eventually discovered that this siege on our homes was to pre-empt the story.”

Dasuki was said to have been involved in a coup that threw Buhari out as military president in 1984.