A survivor of the Kaduna ‘slave house’ raided by police last week has described being there as “living in hellfire”.
“If you are praying they will beat you. If you are studying they will beat you,” Isa Ibrahim, 29, told the BBC.
Recall that 300 men and boys were rescued from the school said to an Islamic centre and correctional facility on September 26.
However the police said it was a place of human slavery, with many of the rescued found in chains.
Some of them said they had been tortured and sexually abused, and had the marks of their experiences on their bodies.
Kaduna state police spokesman Yakubu Sabo said the “dehumanised treatment” they discovered made it impossible to consider the place an Islamic school, Reuters news agency reports. It was not registered as either a school, or a correctional facility, although it did charge fees to parents.
Ibrahim said he was sent to the centre two weeks ago by his family, apparently to “correct his behaviour”.
He said he had tried to escape the day before the police arrived.
He described being chained up to an old generator and also being subjected to a particularly cruel punishment, known as “Tarkila”, where his hands were tied up and he was left hanging from the ceiling.
“I have many injuries. Almost all parts of my body have injuries,” he said. “Even if you are sleeping – they’ll use [a] cane to wake you up.”
He said he had been starved and was only given plain rice to eat. People kept at the centre “lose all of our energy”, he added.
Children as young as five were among those rescued from the institution, which is believed to have been operating for several years. Most of the inmates were from northern Nigeria but two were reportedly from Burkina Faso.
Relatives are being reunited with their children at a camp in Kaduna where the victims were taken after being rescued.
Some said they had been prevented from seeing their children at the school.
“If we had known that this thing was happening in the school, we wouldn’t have sent our children. We sent them to be people but they ended up being maltreated,” said a parent named Ibrahim, who had identified his son.
The Kaduna state government says it will now carry out checks on all Koranic schools across the state.
“This is an eye-opener for us,” said Hafsat Baba, Kaduna State Commissioner of Human Services and Social Development. She added that if this scale of abuse was happening in the main city, she didn’t know what might be going on in rural areas.
“We have to map all the schools. And we have to make sure that if they violate the government orders then they have to be closed down completely,” she told the BBC.
“If we find any facility that is torturing children or is harbouring these kind of horrific situations that we have just seen, they are going to be prosecuted.”
Source: BBC