Seven suspects have been taken into custody after Nigerian Army personnel raided a baby factory in Adamawa State, Northeast Nigeria.
The parade took place at the military headquarters on Saturday after the suspects were captured during the operation on June 23. 17 adolescent girls and two infants were also saved.
They were accused of running a baby factory, a human trafficking business, and a brothel.
The suspects were paraded on Saturday at the brigade headquarters in Yola, the capital of Adamawa State, by Major General Mohammed Jibrin-Gambo, the brigade commander of the 23rd Armoured Brigade.
He said that the brigade’s soldiers were engaged in a special operation along the Nigerian-Cameroonian border when, acting on reliable information, they attacked a criminal stronghold outside Kasingila village in Maiha Local Government Area of Adamawa.
He claimed that the suspects were found less than a kilometer from the Belel district, the last hamlet before entering the Cameroon Republic, in a border settlement.
17 girls between the ages of 19 and 21 as well as two infants were rescued during the operation by a joint team of security personnel.
Speaking to journalists, the camp’s founder, Abubakar Abdullahi, claimed that he had obtained the women from the states of Adamawa, Gombe, and Borno, where he had set up a camp that served as a dance club, a place for prostitution, and a place to sell the children the women gave birth to both inside Nigeria and beyond the Cameroonian border.
The rescued girls were brought to the camp as minors without their families’ knowledge and are believed to have lived there for two to three years.
Some of the victims claimed they were housed in one room and forced to sleep on mats. Additionally, they asserted that their captors withheld the money they had earned in order to prevent them from escaping.
The girls were primarily employed by local criminal gangs to perform at wedding events and naming ceremonies in Nigeria and Cameroon.
According to an investigation, there are many of these camps in the border regions where human trafficking has been on the rise.
As a result, it is anticipated that the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) will reverse this despicable trend soon.
Recall, earlier this month, the Nigerian Army‘s 14 Brigade, Ohafia, conducted a raid on a baby factory at Umunkpei Nvosi in the Abia State local government of Isiala-Ngwa, which was purportedly run by a local.
