SHOCKER! NIGERIANS RUN LIBYAN SLAVE CAMPS - CAMEROONIAN RETURNEE

The new slave trade-human trafficking in Libya is being carried out by many nationalities, including Nigerians and Ghanaians, according to a Cameroonian returnee, who was abducted in the country. 

Foka Fotsi, who was trafficked twice, told Reuters that those in charge of one of the places where he was held included Ghanaians and Nigerians. Fotsi story corroborated another testimony by a Nigerian in the southern state of Edo, who identified one Charles, a Nigerian as the trafficking kingpin. 

Foka Fotsi- battered in a camp run by Nigerians and Ghanaians Unable to find work to support his family, Fotsi decided to leave Cameroon last year, but fell into the hands of a Libyan kidnap ring before reaching Europe. 

“There was torture like I’ve never seen. They hit you with wooden bats, with iron bars,” he said, removing the hood of his sweatshirt and showing the still raw red wounds on his skull. “They hang you from the ceiling by (your) arms and legs and then throw you down to the floor. They swing you and throw you against the wall, over and over again, ten times. “They are not human beings. They are the devil personified.” 

Christelle Timdi, another Cameroonian recounted her horrendous experience in the north African country. When uniformed men boarded the overloaded rubber dingy carrying her and her boyfriend to a new life in Europe, she thought the Italian coastguard had come to rescue them. But the men took out guns and began to shoot. “Many people fell in the sea,” the 32-year-old Cameroonian said as she described seeing her boyfriend, Douglas, falling in the water and disappearing into the darkness. 

The gunmen took Timdi and her fellow passengers back to Libya where they were locked up, raped, beaten and forced to make calls to their families back home for ransom payments to secure their freedom. Timdi, who flew back to Cameroon last week, told her story as international outcry escalated over a video which appeared to show African migrants being traded as slaves in Libya. 

Libya’s U.N.-backed government has said it is investigating and has promised to bring the perpetrators to justice. Timdi said she had not seen the footage broadcast by CNN, but had witnessed the trade in humans while in Libya. “I saw it with my own eyes,” she said, describing how she had seen a Senegalese man buying an African migrant. 

Libya is the main jumping off point for migrants trying to reach Europe by boat. Timdi said many traffickers posed as marine guards, police officers and taxi drivers to ensnare victims. 

There were around 130 other migrants on her boat when the gunmen opened fire in the middle of the night, Timdi said. After being taken back to Libya they were locked in an abandoned factory building where men would grab and rape the girls and women – and sometimes even the men. “We tried to hide the younger girls among us,” Timdi said, describing the terrifying moments when the guards would scour the room with torches, searching for their next victims. 

“I was heavily pregnant – that’s why I wasn’t raped. And it’s all done in front of others – they say it’s so that you know what will happen to you if you don’t pay up.” Timdi said the facilities used by traffickers appeared to be well organised and guarded, adding that most people inside wore fake police or military uniforms.

 “The place was surrounded by army-style vehicles with guns ready to fire, so we didn’t dare try and escape.”

 Timdi’s family paid 1 million CFA francs ($1,800), frantically collected from relatives and friends, to free her. 

But she said ransoms were no guarantee of safety. The traffickers work with a network of taxi drivers who are supposed to transfer released migrants to migrant camps – but who often re-traffick them, Timdi said. “If they send you a good taxi, you’ll arrive at your destination, but if it’s a bad taxi the driver will sell you on to someone else,” she said. “There are people who have been resold twice, three times. And when you call your family to tell them that you’ve been resold once again, no one will believe you, they won’t send more money to free you.” Timdi was released by her captors in October and gave birth to a baby girl, Brittanie, in a Libyan hospital just days later. 

Timdi and Fotsi were among 250 Cameroonians who were flown home this week by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) as part of a voluntary return scheme for migrants stranded in Libya. The programme, funded by the European Union, provided returnees with clothing and medical checks. The most vulnerable, including pregnant women, also received around 400 euros ($475). IOM Cameroon head Boubacar Saybou said it was launching a programme to help migrants set up businesses, and will also provide start-up funding. 

“We need to create opportunities for them here. That’s what’s important,” he said. Fotsi said he hoped to follow up on the scheme. But for now his most pressing problem was finding a place to sleep. “I pray that God gives me work that I can do here,” he said. “If we don’t get work you’ll find many of us walking the streets again.”

HORRIFIC TALES OF HOW NIGERIANS ABDUCTED AND SOLD FELLOW NIGERIANS INTO SLAVERY IN LIBYA

Some Nigerians returning from Libya

 

In the midst of the uproar over revelations that Libyan nationals are buying and selling migrants as slaves in Libya, Saturday PUNCH has learnt that Nigerians based in the country also sell their fellow countrymen.

This emerged as more Nigerians are repatriated by the International Organisation for Migration with the backing of the European Union in an ongoing exercise that has seen 1,295 retrieved from Libya in November alone.

Since the beginning of 2017, IOM-facilitated repatriation has brought back 5,578 Nigerian migrants, who were trapped in and outside prisons across Libya.

On Thursday night, 150 migrants from mostly Edo and Delta states arrived the country aboard a Buraq Airplane at the cargo terminal of the Murtala International Airport, Lagos. It was two days after 239 migrants had also been brought into the country.

Many of the returnees, who were thankful for being back, confirmed to Saturday PUNCH that they were sold by their fellow countrymen, who were getting rich in Libya.

One of them, 26-year-old Odion Saliu, a hairdresser from Edo State, said she was kidnapped and handed over to a Nigerian, who forced her to call her mother.

According to her, her mother in Benin paid N200, 000 but she was again sold by the same Nigerian for 3,000 dinars (about N794, 000).

Saliu explained that the Nigerians spoke Pidgin English and some Nigerian languages.

She said, “When I was kidnapped with others and held for some weeks, the Arabs asked if I wanted to be taken to a Nigerian and I readily said yes. I was very happy that I was going to someone from my country. But it was a lie.

“The Nigerian they took me to locked me in a cell and told me to call my mother and ask for N60, 000. The man said he would sell me to a connection house if my family did not get the money. I called to inform my mother and the trafficker who facilitated my journey from Nigeria.

“But the trafficker spoke with them on the phone and told them the amount they demanded was too small. They increased it to N200, 000. My mother paid into an account after they provided her with the account number over the phone.

“The Nigerian said if I wanted to cross the sea, I had to pay him again. But when we got to the seaside, he sold me again.”

Another Edo State indigene, Sunday Anyaegbunam, left Nigeria along with his wife in April.

He said during their nine-day journey through the desert, they were sold twice by Nigerians.

According to him, when their Nigerian “burger” (trafficker) sold them to another set of Libyan traffickers at Agadez, Niger, the traffickers sold him and his wife to a Nigerian who took them to Sabha, Libya, where they were separated in different cells.

“We were made to contact our families on the phone and I had to ensure the payment of N400, 000 for my release and N300, 000 for my wife,” Anyaegbunam said.

Like others, he could only identify the Nigerians trading in their countrymen in Libya through the Nigerian languages they spoke and their accent.

He said, “The Nigerians selling people in Libya are more wicked than many of the Arabs. I have never seen people so heartless as the Nigerians who bought and sold me.

“There are many of them in Agadez and Sabha, who are making so much money from selling their own people. But there are other West Africans doing the business too.

“When you approach them and say, ‘Please, my brother, help me.’ They would tell you, “No brother in the jungle.”
A 25-year-old woman, Esosa Osas, who was in Libya for six months, said she also met many Nigerians selling their countrymen.

“You dare not talk to them, else they would beat you and lock you up. They sell women for 5,000 dinars and men for N4, 000 dinars. I noticed that the connection houses were also controlled by Nigerian women.”

All these accounts were corroborated by 35-year-old Harrison Okotie who lived in Libya for three years until his repatriation.

“Nigerians and Libyans are doing the business like they are one big happy family,” he said.

Most of the migrants who arrived Nigeria on Thursday were from Edo State.

Officials of the state’s task force on illegal migration were on hand with luxurious buses to transport their people back home.

A member of the task force, Mr. Okoduwa Solomon, told Saturday PUNCH that his team had made six such journeys to the airport within the last one month to take their indigenes repatriated from Libya back home.

He said, “The first process is to take them through counselling, then we profile them.

“After that, we put them in a home that the state government has provided for the returnees. The Edo State Government is paying each of the returnees from the state a stipend.

"They are going to undergo a training in agriculture, poultry, fishery and others to make them useful to themselves and the system.”

Officials of the National Emergency Management Agency coordinate the reception of the returnees at the airport.South West Zonal Coordinator of the agency, Mr. Yakubu Sulaiman, said the returnees would be lodged in a hotel where they would have the chance to clean up before their journey back home.

Meanwhile, President, Women Arise and Centre for Change, Dr. Joe Okei-Odumakin, has called on the Federal Government to use all diplomatic channels to prevail on the Libyan authorities to ensure the dignity of our people.

She said in a statement on Friday that it was an embarrassment that Nigerians who were treated like royalty in the past were being dehumanised in a foreign land.

“We must build a country where our people have opportunities to prosper and lead useful and productive lives and will only travel on leisure and business and not as illegal migrants desperate

CHARLIE BOY, OTHERS PROTEST AGAINST SLAVE TRADE IN LIBYA

Charly Boy and other Nigerians protesting in Abuja

 

Charly Boy, Deji Adeyanju, and some other Nigerians protested at the Libyan Embassy, Abuja to condemn the slave trade going on in Libya. Photos of some of the slaves which was publicized by Cable News Network (CNN) left many people totally shocked.