Parents of some of the children rescued by police wait to see them at the Hajj transit camp in Kaduna, Nigeria
KADUNA (Nigeria), Oct 1 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Nigerian authorities scrambled to find the families of hundreds of men and boys freed from a purported school where some had been kept in chains, tortured and allegedly sexually abused.
Police freed as many as 400 males aged from six to 50 from the house in Kaduna in northern Nigeria in a raid on Thursday. Some had been chained to radiators, tyres or hub caps, and others bore visible signs of scars from whippings and beatings.
More than a dozen, including 10 children, were hospitalized on Saturday. All the adults were in critical condition, with one vomiting blood.
Police set up a makeshift camp for the others on the edge of the city and were trying to register the freed inmates. In one of the buildings at the camp, children queued to register their names against a list, later laughing and playing before being served a plate of noodles.
Outside, dozens of parents, faces contorted with worry, gathered to collect their children. Some had paid tuition fees to the men running the house believing it to be an Islamic school, while others viewed it as a correctional facility with no expectation of instruction.
Kaduna state police spokesman Yakubu Sabo said the “dehumanized treatment” they discovered made it impossible to consider the house an Islamic school.
Hafsat Mohammed Baba, the state’s commissioner of human services and social development, said a headcount had accounted for just 190 people, including 113 adults and 77 children. The reason for the discrepancy in numbers was not immediately clear, but authorities said some of those freed had immediately fled.
Police raided the site after a relative was denied access. Seven people who said they were teachers at the school were arrested.
Police called on families from across the region, from the suburbs of Kaduna to the nearby countries of Ghana, Mali and Burkina Faso, to collect the individuals. Despite reports of abuse, some were reluctant to return home with their family members. — NNN-AGENCIES
