More than 300 captives, most of them children and many in chains, have been rescued from a building in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna, police say.
Key points:
Some of the captives had their ankles manacled together and were chained to metal hubcaps
The building housed an Islamic school
A police spokesman said seven teachers at the school were arrested
All the children seen by a Reuters reporter at the scene were boys aged from around five to their late teens.
Some had their ankles manacled together and others were chained by their legs to large metal hubcaps.
Police said the building housed an Islamic school and that seven people had been arrested in the raid on Thursday.
It was not clear how long the children had been held there.
“The State Government is currently providing food to the children who are between the ages of five and above,” Yakubu Sabo, the Kaduna police spokesman, said.
“We have identified two of the children to have come from Burkina Faso, while most of them were brought by their parents from across mostly northern Nigerian states,” he added.
He said those arrested were teachers at the school.
Reports carried by local media said the captives had been tortured, starved and sexually abused. Reuters was not immediately able to confirm those reports, though sores that appeared consistent with injuries inflicted by a whip were visible on one boy’s back.
Islamic schools, known as Almajiris, are common across the mostly Muslim north of Nigeria — a country that is roughly evenly split between followers of Christianity and Islam.
Parents in northern Nigeria, the poorest part of a country in which most people live on less than US$2 ($2.96) a day, often opt to leave their children to board at the schools.
The freed children have been moved to a temporary camp at a stadium in Kaduna. Police said they would later be moved to another camp in a suburb of the city while attempts were made to find their parents.
