Five officers of the Nigerian Prisons Service, serving in Benue are to face the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission to authenticate their certificates.
The Benue State Controller of Prisons, Peter Pevigo, disclosed this in Makurdi on Tuesday in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria.
He said that the officers were among the 382 others picked by the ICPC across the country to validate their certificates.
Pevigo explained that the officers were not guilty of certificate forgery, but were only invited by the anti-graft agency to clear some grey issues surrounding such certificates.
He said: “No officer is found guilty until the joint investigation by NPS and ICPC is concluded, and an official report communicated to me; it is then that they could be deemed culpable.
“The letter was from the prisons national headquarters and ICPC, and only five junior officers were affected in my command.”
According to the letter, 740 officers’ certificates have not been authenticated and needed to be verified.
Pevigo said: “So the affected officers have already been communicated to appear before our board and ICPC, between July 26 and August 4 to authentic their certificates.”