LAGOS - Police in Nigeria have rescued 64 children from a container truck normally used for transporting for frozen fish and arrested three suspects for child trafficking, a Lagos police spokesman said Monday.
A surveillance team intercepted the vehicle in the commercial capital's southwestern Amukoko district on Saturday evening and found the children, aged between one and 14, stowed away in the container, Ademola Adebayo said.
"The demeanour of the driver of the truck, his conductor and a woman sitting in front of the vehicle, aroused the suspicion of the policemen who insisted that the luggage unit of the truck be opened," Adebayo told AFP by telephone.
"When it was opened, 64 children were found in it," he added.
A woman suspect in the truck, who gave her name as Fatima Baba, "confessed to bringing the children from Mokwa town in central Niger State as house helps," Adebayo said.
"But the issue is what kind of house help can a one-year-old kid render? So we suspect that she is into child trafficking. Who knows how long she has been in this dirty business?" he asked.
The woman and her two accomplices were handed over to the CID for interrogation following which they would be charged to court, he also said.
The police said last week here that they were detaining 10 suspects on charges they ran an orphanage for child trafficking.
Following a tip-off, the police swooped on the Good Shepherd Orphanage in Okota, on the northern outskirts of Lagos, on the suspicion that its staff were engaged in child trafficking and the selling of babies, the police said.
Human trafficking and the sale of human body parts are rampant in Nigeria and government efforts to fight the crimes have not in the past yielded appreciable success.
03/07/2005 14:43 GMT