Trafficking: NAPTIP Reunites 22 Tripoli-bound Victims with Families

By Onuminya Innocent

The National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons (NAPTIP), Sokoto State Command, has reunited 22 victims of human trafficking rescued from Niger Republic recently.

The Zonal Commander of the agency in the state, Abubakar Bashiru, disclosed this while addressing journalists in his office yesterday.

Bashiru, while addressing journalists, disclosed that the agency, having counsel the victims, contacted their families on how they will be reunited.

He said their parents in returned contacted their various community leaders in Sokoto on how they could help them to receive their children.

The zonal commander said the rescued children are from Lagos, Ondo, Ogun, Oyo, Osun, Ekiti, Imo, Delta, and Edo States respectively.

NAPTIP last Tuesday in a press conference revealed that the agency, through the collaboration of Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) and their counterpart in Niger Republic, rescued about 23 victims of human trafficking.

The victims, who are mainly from the Southern part of the country, were cajoled by their agents, currently at large, to travel to Tripoli in Libya through Sokoto-Niger Republic route.

Speaking on behalf of the parents, the President-General of Yoruba community in Sokoto, Chief James Olorunfemi, expressed sadness over the development.

He disclosed that the Yoruba community in Sokoto had contacted parents of the children and expressed their mind on the issue.

Olorunfemi said arrangements is being made to send delegates to the states with the highest number of victims to counsel their parents and prosecute others if need be.

He appealed to the traditional and religious leaders in the South-west region to come together and address the menace of trafficking, which he described as alien to Yoruba culture.

According to him, “As a Yoruba leader, I am so sad that our children are involved in trafficking in which the syndicate are selling them, and is not part of our culture.

“We contacted some of the parents and spoke to them in the language some of them never expected.

“What they did was against the law of the country by sending those children, most of them are less than twenty years, on a journey to another man’s land instead of trying to prepare them for their future.”