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Trafficker nabbed in Nigeria
13/05/2008 21:16 - (SA)
Kano - Immigration officials in the northern Nigerian city of Kano said on Tuesday they have arrested a suspected human trafficker with 21 victims, some of them teenagers, bound for Libya.
"Our men on Monday apprehended a man suspected to be a human trafficker with 21 victims, 16 of them girls, between the ages of 16 and 30 at a motor park in the city heading for Libya," Oemi Bio Ockiya, head of the Kano immigration authorities, said while presenting those arrested to reporters.
Ockiya said the suspected trafficker, a Nigerian national and a resident of Libya, Samuel Osagie, told the victims' parents he was taking them to Libya ostensibly to work as maids and labourers.
Each of the trafficked persons was to pay Osagie a fee of 150 000 naira.
Ockiya said the 16 girls in the group, from four southern states, had arranged with Osagie to pay their fees out of the money they would earn once in Europe, their final destination.
The immigration chief said that the money would come from prostitution.
The trafficking of young women to Europe through Kano is a common occurrence. The traffickers previously smuggled their victims out through Kano airport using fake and stolen passports.
However the introduction at the airport of state-of-the-art passport reading machines and a spate of arrests have caused the traffickers to change their strategy and resort to driving their victims through Niger and into Libya, from where they are shipped to Europe, Ockiya said.
"That's why we have deployed men from our intelligence unit to all the motor parks in the city to be on the lookout for human traffickers," Ockiya said.
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