By Alexis Akwagyiram
KADUNA, Nigeria, Sept 28 (Reuters) - Nigerian authorities on
Saturday scrambled to find the families of hundreds of men and
boys freed from a school where some had been kept in chains,
sexually abused and tortured.
Police freed as many as 400 captives, aged from six to 50,
from the house in Kaduna in northern Nigeria in a raid on
Thursday. Some were chained to radiators, tires or hub caps and
others bore visible signs of scars from whippings and beatings.
More than a dozen, including 10 children, were hospitalized
on Saturday. All the adults were in critical condition, with one
vomiting blood.
Police set up a makeshift camp for the others at the edge of
the city and were trying to register the freed captives. In one
of the buildings at the camp, children queued to register their
names against a list, later laughing and playing before being
served a plate of noodles.
Outside, dozens of parents, faces contorted with worry,
gathered to collect their children. Some had paid tuition fees
to the men running the house believing it to be an Islamic
school, while others viewed it as a correctional facility with
no expectation of instruction.
Kaduna state police spokesman Yakubu Sabo said the
"dehumanized treatment" they discovered made it impossible to
consider the house an Islamic school.
Local media said some of the children had been tortured,
staved and even sexually abused. Reuters was unable to
immediately verify the reports.
Hafsat Mohammed Baba, the state's commissioner of human
services and social development, told Reuters a headcount had
accounted for just 190 people, including 113 adults and 77
children. The reason for the discrepancy in numbers was not
immediately clear, but authorities said some freed from the home
fled immediately.
FREED CAPTIVES
Police raided the school after a relative was denied access
to the captives. Seven people who said they were teachers at the
school were arrested in the raid.
Police called on families from across the region, from the
suburbs of Kaduna to the nearby countries of Ghana, Mali and
Burkina Faso, to collect the freed captives. Despite the reports
of abuse, some were reluctant to return home with their family
members.
Mohammed Sani Abu Sha'aban, a father of 13 from the Kaduna
suburb of Nasarawa, sent two of his sons - 16-year-old Salim and
25-year-old Jamilu - to the school for more than three years.
He paid 34,000 naira ($111) per term and said it had helped
his sons, particularly Salim. "Now that they are set free, he
may relapse into his past negative attitude of absconding from
school and other vices," Sha'aban said.
Islamic schools, known as Almajiris, are common across the
mostly Muslim north of Nigeria. Widespread poverty prompts many
parents to leave their children at the institutions, yet they
have been dogged by reports of abuse and accusations that some
children are forced to beg on the streets rather than get an
education.
Some activists have called on the government to outlaw the
schools.
But Sha'aban, who said he visited regularly and never saw
signs of poor treatment, called on the state to keep the Kaduna
school open. "The closure of the school is really a source of
concern and very disturbing to us who have unruly children and
wards," he said.
($1 = 305.9000 naira)
(Writing by Libby George
Editing by David Holmes)