Nigeria – Spanish police last Thursday claimed they have arrested three Nigerians who forced African women into prostitution in Europe, including holding two women’s children held captive for at least four months.

This was disclosed through a police statement which stated that five women in different Spanish cities were freed from the clutches of the gang after a long operation that began at the beginning of the year, on the basis of information from a young African prostitute.

In August, police rescued two little children; one of them aged three, from an address in Valmojado, some 50 kilometres (30 miles) from Madrid. They were found in poor health and malnourished.

They were kept locked in separate rooms, at times restrained and tied to the bed by captors who fed them tranquilisers to keep them docile, the statement said.

According to the statement, the children were to guarantee that the women paid off their ‘debts’ by going into prostitution and to stop them running away.

The mothers were eventually found in France, where they were forced to work as prostitutes.

The criminal gang holding them used that and other strategies to bring Nigerian women to Spain and force them to work as prostitutes, the police said.

The women who were smuggled to Spain by boat from Morocco were enticed with fraudulent promises, with false job offers or by abusing their precarious situation, and once in Spain, they are sold to pimps in EU countries, the statement said.