… say Nigerians in jail ate their own excreta, drank urine
Nigerian returnees from Libya have revealed how citizens of the North African country turned them to sex slaves as they allegedly raped both men and women at will.
Recounting their harrowing experience in the hands of the Libyans, the returnees from Edo State, who were received at the Benin Motel Plaza, said that they saw “hell.”
They were among the 147 Nigerians deported from Libya.
As she alighted from one of the buses that brought them from Lagos, hungry-looking and dejected Miss Itohan Ugiagbe said she was ashamed of herself for attempting to go to Europe through Libya.
Ugiagbe also expressed fears that she might have contracted some strange disease because of the way and manner she was sexually abused by the Libyans.
She said that they were attacked at a camp as they prepared to board a ship to Spain.
Ugiagbe said Libyan militias took them to their base that looked like an underground tunnel, where they were humiliated, dehumanised and sexually abused by no fewer than 15 men daily.
She said the men amongst them were not spared such sexual abuse as the Libyans sodomised them.
Speaking in the same vein, another of the Libya returnees, simply identified as Jennifer, who was sobbing, said she had never been so humiliated the way the Libyan militias sexually abused them.
Jennifer, who claimed to be 21 years old, appealed to the Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State to isolate the returnees to enable them to undergo proper medical examination so that they could be certified healthy and free of communicable diseases “before they mix with others in the society.”
Issac Odianose said he was in Libyan prison for over eight months, disclosing that over 30 Nigerians died in the North African country’s jails.
The Libyan militias are deadly, they don’t give you food; water is not made available at all. That is how they starve our people to death. It’s painful
Odianose added that some Nigerians in Libyan jails were constrained to eat their own excreta and drink their urine, owing to excruciating hunger they were subjected to by prison officials.
“The Libyan militias are deadly, they don’t give you food; water is not made available at all. That is how they starve our people to death. It’s painful,” he said.
Also narrating her nightmarish experience, 17-year-old Blessing Sunday said her father sold his belongings to raise money to secure her release after she was abducted and kept in a cell in Libya.
Blessing noted that she dropped out of school to learn hair-dressing before a woman offered to assist her to travel abroad. She said several persons in the three Hilux vans they boarded from Kano to Libya died on the way due to starvation and thirst.
“When we got to Libya, I was kidnapped. They made me to call my father for ransom. He sold his property to set me free. I am the last child of the family and we don’t have anything at home now. There was no food or water during the trip. You see people dying. We bought provision and water and I managed my own in order to survive. My father sold all his property to enable me get to the seaside. I didn’t enter the boat on the sea,” she said.
Another returnee, Michael Ogbebor, who had his two hands encased in Plaster of Paris, said he broke his two hands when the ‘White House’ in which they lodged in Suprata was attacked.
Ogbebor said he worked as a car washer in Lagos, and through that, he raised the sum of N300,000 with which he traveled to Libya.
“I spent eight years to save the N300,000 I spent on my travel. In Libya, people were always ‘kalabushing’ each other; that is tracking each other’s boat. I had not entered the boat when I was rescued and brought back. I wanted to jump from a storey building, when I fell. They came and saw that I was finished; so they left me. It was the UN that came and took me to the hospital,” he said.
Meanwhile, 84 of the 142 Nigerians deported from Libya were received by the Edo State Governor, Mr. Godwin Obaseki. They were received and lodged in a hotel to await rehabilitation by the Edo State Task Force on Trafficking, led by Prof. (Mrs.) Yinka Omoregbe, who is the Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice in the state.
At the reception, Governor Obaseki assured the returnees, comprising 60 males and 24 females, that his administration would place them on a monthly salary/stipend for three months during which they would undergo various vocational trainings.
He explained that the goal of his government was to make them ambassadors to sensitise other youths about the risks associated with illegal migration.
