by Azubuike Azikiwe
A Sierra Leonean, Koffi Hassan, has been arrested by the Nigeria Immigration Service, Enugu State Command, over the trafficking women out of Nigeria for prostitution.
This information was disemminated by Bashir Ismail, the immigration Comptroller, to the press on Wednesday, 17 September. Ismail said Hassan, a human traffic kingpin who had been on their wanted list, was arrested after getting a tip-off.
He said, “Human trafficking has been a challenge in this part of the country. Just last month we succeeded in arresting one notorious human trafficker called Mr Koffi, who has been involved in human trafficking of women and involving them in prostitution.
“We have been tracking him and we were able to arrest that kingpin. We have now forwarded him for prosecuting. After prosecution we will definitely repatriate him. That’s a great achievement for us; we have been challenged for this kind of things around this area.
“And that will signal to those who are involved in that to desist from it. Victims that are with him confessed what he uses them for and NAPTIP has succeeded in reuniting them with their families,” he added.
Ismail also revealed that the immigration service had began a regular repatriation of criminal aliens like Hassan, saying 98 of such people, who are mostly fron Togo, Niger and Mali, had been flushed out of the state in the past 8 months.
He said, “The service decided to embark on regular repatriation and removal of such kind of citizens that are among us. So far between January and now we have removed over 98 people out of Enugu. We have to be on it and to be fair and be frank we have been getting great support from Enugu State government.”
“These people we remove are from our efforts to go and flush them out from the communities in which they live. They have become a threat to them. Then we also get people referred to us due to our synergy from other security agencies. Whenever they have such kind of people arrested among other criminals, they do refer to us then we take action.”
“We are very happy with that because the synergy has been working very well. That’s why we were able to repatriate such number. Most of the nationals are from Niger Republic, Togo and Mali and a few Beninois and the Cameroonians.”
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