Police arrest suspected child trafficker

Police in the southeast Nigerian state of Anambra arrested a suspected child labour trafficker on Wednesday, according to news reports. Anambra police spokesman Yemi Ajayi said 97 children and “elderly women” were intercepted in a truck along the Onitsha-Enugu expressway, in the east of the country. He said 60 of the passengers were male, `The Guardian’ newspaper of Lagos reported. Women among the group told the police they had left Ugwulangwu, in nearby Ebonyi State, for Lagos which, Ajayi said, served as a rendez-vous for traffickers taking their captives to neighbouring Benin and Cote d’Ivoire. The children, whose poor parents often sell them to middlemen, end up as servants or farmhands, or do other menial jobs. The ILO estimates that some 250 million children between the ages of five and 14 work in developing countries alone. About half, or some 120 million, work full time, while the rest combine work and schooling.