Rescued kids back with families
08/03/2005 17:31  - (SA)  

Container full of 'slave' kids Nigerians held for trafficking

Lagos - Police in Nigeria have started seeking out the families of 64 young child victims of a trafficking network rescued from a container truck to have them reunited, a Lagos police spokesperson said on Tuesday.

"We will reunite the children with their families, which are mainly in Niger State" in the centre of the west African nation, Ademola Adebayo said. "The reunification process has already started."

A police surveillance team in Lagos found the children, aged between less than a year old and 14, on Saturday evening on a container truck normally used for transporting frozen fish, after the adult occupants of the vehicle behaved suspiciously during a road check.

"All together we have 64 children, among them 45 girls, ranking from 0 to 14 years old, and we cannot keep them for too long," Adebayo told AFP, adding that the gang which had rounded them up had intended to sell them off mainly as household help in Lagos.

The process of returning the children to their families was possible on the basis of their own statements and those of the suspects, who included the truck driver, his conductor and a woman.

Tipped-off

"The people who brought them will help us to find the communities," the police officer said, adding that the children were "victims of internal human trafficking, as well as children who are brought from or to foreign countries".

On Monday, Adebayo said the female suspect in the truck, who gave her name as Fatima Baba, "confessed to bringing the children from Mokwa town in central Niger State as house helps".

The woman and her two accomplices were handed over to the CID for interrogation and would be charged in court, he said.

The police said last week that they were detaining 10 suspects on charges they ran an orphanage for child trafficking.

Following a tip-off, the police swooped on the Good Shepherd Orphanage in Okota, on the northern outskirts of Lagos, on the suspicion that its staff were engaged in child trafficking and the selling of babies, the police said.

Human trafficking and the sale of human body parts are rampant in Nigeria and government efforts to fight the crimes have not in the past yielded appreciable success.

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