With about 12 years gone by since the Idia Renaissance group in Benin-City led by Mrs Eki
Igbinedion, wife
of former governor of Edo State, led a spirited campaign against human
trafficking especially to
Italy and other parts of Europe, the Spanish police have revealed they have
broken up a ring that smuggled women
from Nigeria into Spain and forced them into street prostitution by burning
them with irons and using voodoo rituals.
The
well-connected pimps, who usually come to Nigeria to look for young and
innocent girls for the illicit trade of prostitution on
the streets of European countries, usually lie to the parents of the
unsuspecting girls that their children are being taken abroad to
work as store/supermarket attendants, clerks or such other jobs.
In
turn, they lure these girls to their destinations and make them swear an oath
of allegiance and loyalty and even faithfulness to the
terms and conditions of their engagement. The gang often tortured the women and
scared them with curses to force them on to
the
streets.
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| PROSTITUTES |
According
to Daily Mail of London, six people, including one woman, believed to be the
ringleader, were arrested after one of the women alerted
the Spanish authorities.
“The
control exercised over women was total, involving verbal threats as well as
physical violence and various voodoo ceremonies to terrorise them,”
police said in a statement.
“The
ring leader caused them serious injury through bites or by using an iron to
cause second-degree burns.”
The
ring allegedly recruited women in Benin City, the capital of Edo State,
reported Sky News.
Most
of the women were vulnerable, struggling to raise children because their
husbands and fathers had died. The gang transported the women over
land to Morocco.
From
there, they were smuggled to small wooden boats and taken into Spain. They were
forced to work as street prostitutes in Barcelona and Malaga.
Spanish
police have swooped on them several times in past years on similar prostitution
rings that used the threat of voodoo curses. Often, the victims are
taken to shrines and after taking oaths, are made to drink some substances that
are meant to act as a monitor on their oaths. After which, they are
told
to leave personal items like dresses, bras, or such warts behind.
They
are told this gives the juju priests power to harm them from afar, should they
fail to keep to the terms, a kind of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).
They are instructed to pay their debts, determined by the pimps, and forced to
join a prostitution ring.
The
women are brainwashed to believe that breaking their promise to the pimp will
hold catastrophic consequences for both them and their families.
Sex
gangs often use a form of witchcraft or juju to scare their “slaves” into
working for them. Last year, a Nigerian people smuggler who used witchcraft
rituals
to force children to work as sex slaves was jailed for 20 years in Britain.
Osezua
Osolase, 42, tricked poverty-stricken Nigerian orphans into travelling to the
UK with the promise of a better life. But the young victims were raped, equally
abused and subjected to voodoo-style rituals by a child trafficking cartel.
Osolase,
the linchpin of a multi-million pound global sex trafficking ring, used “juju”
magic
