Two Nigerian pimps in Belgium sentenced to 8 and 9 years – trafficked girls given money back


nsnbc : Two leaders of a Nigerian prostitution and trafficking gang have been sentenced to 8 and 9 years, respectively, in the Belgian city of Bruges. The two were found guilty of human trafficking and forced prostitution. Six other members were also found guilty.

Belgium_Red Light in Belgium_(archives)The gang smuggled a total of 25 young Nigerian women into Belgium. The youngest trafficked woman was no more than 17 years old.

The women were re-paying the cost of their voyage from Nigeria to Belgium with the money they earned with prostitution. The gang reportedly earned about 700,000 euro on the 25 women.

Prostitution as such is legal in Belgium. The gang broke the law because pimping, the trafficking of people into Belgium for prostitution, and the operation of brothels – especially by non-sex workers – are prohibited.

Most of the illegal practices took place in Antwerp. However, the women were also taken by taxi to Ostend in West Flanders, to meet customers in hotels. It was in one such hotel that that the police set a trap and were able to detain most of the gang in January.

The two leaders of the gang have been sentenced to 8 and 9 years respectively by a court in Bruges. 6 others were given sentences of 6 years in prison. In a twist that clearly shows that neither Belgian law nor authorities want to target sex workers but want to stop trafficking and pimps, three of the gang’s victims were given compensation totaling 28,500 euro.

Testimony revealed that the gang first used “magical rituals” to scare the women while they were still in Nigeria. Once they were in Belgium the women were forced to live in inhumane conditions in a flat. Some of them told detectives that the flat was infested with rats.

Trafficked Nigerian sex worker in Italy

Trafficked Nigerian sex worker in Italy

In May another Nigerian prostitution network was dismantled in Brussels. 30 young women were saved and 5 suspects, including the suspected leader of the gang, were arrested. Here too, the women had been brainwashed with voodoo. Here the suspected leader of the gang was a women.

In 2014 nsnbc international editor in-chief Christof Lehmann spoke with trafficked Nigerian women in Denmark. The women were being held under similar circumstances as the ones described by those in Belgium.

Nigerian women normally paid between 30,000 – 40,000 euros for being trafficked from Nigeria to Denmark, Belgium, or other European destinations.

Normally their passports are being kept by pimps while the girls are forced to pay so much for “extra services” to their pimps that they hardly ever get out of debt slavery.

In a 2014 interview with several trafficked African prostitutes in a provincial town in Denmark, one of the girls told Lehmann that she was hospitalized with severe blood loss after having been forced to service numerous “clients” one day.

Asked how she managed at the hospital she reported that a health insurance card was “lent” to her by her pimp. When she was asked why she didn’t use the occasion to escape, she said that she was scared. Her pimp knows who her family is, and they will kill someone if I run away, she said.

The standard price for these trafficked African girls in Denmark is between 170 and 200 dollars per hour. A trafficked girl can expect to earn about 20 to 30 of these max 200 dollars. From that income, they are often forced to pay 50 – 100 dollars per day for accommodation and other “services”.

Emma Christopher, an expert on slavery and human trafficking, stressed that tens of thousands of people are bought and sold in Nigeria every year. The majority of them are children. Christopher is referring to the International Labour Organization which estimated that in 2003, as many as six million Nigerian children had been trafficked at some time in their lives.

CH/L – nsnbc 20.09.2017



Source Article from https://nsnbc.me/2017/09/20/two-nigerian-pimps-in-belgium-sentenced-to-8-and-9-years-trafficked-girls-given-money-back/

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