The world of Nigeria's sex- trafficking 'Air Lords'- BBC Report

British airports such as Gatwick are increasingly
used as entry points to the European Union by
Nigerian trafficking gangs seeking alternatives to
perilous Mediterranean Sea crossings, Spanish
police have warned. BBC News quoted a crime
squad officer in Barcelona as saying his team had
bust a notorious Nigerian crime organisation
running a network of trafficked prostitutes across
the city.
The gang, Supreme Eiye Confraternity (SEC), also
"using forged documents and passports to fly its
Nigerian victims into places like Gatwick," Xavier
Cortes, head of anti-trafficking at Catalonia
police, said in a BBC interview.
The number of people identified as potential
victims of human trafficking in Britain rose by 21
per cent to 3,309 in 2014, the UK's National
Crime Agency (NCA) said last year. The
nationality of the victims was known in only
2,100 cases of which nearly 9 percent were
Nigerian, the agency's data showed. Below is a
special report by BBC:
"The world of Nigeria's sex trafficking 'Air Lords'"
Last year, the BBC's Sam Piranty was given
access by the Catalan police, Mossos
D'Esquadra, to an investigation into a Nigerian
sex-trafficking gang. He spoke to traffickers and
women rescued from sexual slavery before filming
an early morning raid in November, which led to
23 arrests. He also discovered that the gang is
now using London as a gateway into Europe.
It's 08:00 in the Catalan Police Headquarters on
the outskirts of Barcelona and Xavi Cortes, head
of the anti-trafficking unit, waits patiently for his
22 teams to confirm they are in position. Finally,
he gives the order.
Two-hundred-and-fifty officers quietly climb out of
their police vans. Single file, each team
approaches a residential building watched by a
few surprised neighbours.
On reaching the door, one of the masked police
officers uses his fingers to count down. Three,
two, one. The door is knocked down, the silence
shattered, the officers rush inside.
The raid results in the arrest of the leaders of a
Nigerian-based group running an international
sex-trafficking ring in Barcelona. It's known as
the Supreme Eiye Confraternity (SEC), or the Air
Lords, and 23 people are now behind bars, with
European Arrest Warrants issued for those who
have left the country.
This operation was 18 months in the planning and
involved monitoring more than a million phone
calls, tapping dozens of mobile phones and
months of surveillance.
Cortes and his team first came across the group
in 2011 during a forgery investigation, but quickly
discovered it was a huge network trafficking
women and drugs.
He asks me to look at his screen. On it is a map
detailing all the locations they have identified
where members of the SEC operate. Cities are
marked in Europe, North, West and East Africa,
North and South America, the Middle East and
Asia.
Eiye in Yoruba, the main language of south-
western Nigeria means "bird". The group's
insignia is an eagle and each city containing
members is called a "nest", with the "mother nest"
in Ibadan, about 100km (60 miles) north-east of
Lagos.
The group was started at the University of Ibadan
in the 1970s, and the original intention was to
make a positive contribution to society. Over time,
however, many members went astray, committing
violence in Nigeria and delving into crime abroad.
The group now traffics human beings and
narcotics (cocaine and marijuana) and forges
passports. It has also facilitated the transport of
stolen crude oil into Europe.
"They are able to earn money in many ways, but
we are focused on human-trafficking and the
victims," says Cortes.
His second-in-command, Alex Escola, then tells
me something remarkable.
"You know, one of the tappings showed us that
last year, on 7 July, around 400 members of SEC
met in Geneva. They had a big meeting, all
together."
It was an audacious display of arrogance. In a
city where many of the world's global institutions
are headquartered, including numerous UN
agencies, a global criminal institution held its own
parallel international gathering and no-one tried to
stop it.
Benin City, Nigeria, is a human-trafficking hub,
and a good place to observe how the criminal
operation works.
After long negotiations, our team manages to
speak to a recruiter, whose job it is to find girls.
The recruiter explains that they either approach
girls directly or through their families offering
fake jobs abroad in a supermarket, or as a
cleaner.
However, not everyone is tricked. Many women
approach the recruiters themselves, often in full
knowledge that they will be working as a
prostitute in Europe. Some parents, also aware of
this, approach recruiters on behalf of their
children.
Destiny, who was 19 when she was trafficked to
Spain three years ago, told me she knew sex
would be involved but had never imagined she
would be turned into a sex slave.
"If you live in Benin, there are many girls who
came back from [Spain] with lots of money. They
told us they had to have sex sometimes," she
says. "We are not stupid but I did not know I
would be beaten and raped and have to have sex
every night of the week."
NGOs in Benin City say many of the recruiters
now look outside the major cities in order to find
girls who have not heard their warnings about the
reality of life for trafficked women, or the stories
of those like Destiny who have returned and are
now alerting others to the dangers.
Once recruited, the girls are then taken to Lagos
or to northern Nigeria where they are picked up
by men known as "coyotes" or "trolleys"
The journey to Europe is perilous. Wire taps
reveal how coyotes transporting women were
stopped by armed groups in the deserts of Niger
or southern Libya demanding thousands of euros
for them to pass.
"One phone call from a coyote to SEC showed
how a coyote was saying, 'I have a gun on my
head and they want money,'" says Cortes.
A woman who was herself trafficked tells me
about other horrors.
"The journey took weeks," says Sarah, who
arrived in Spain in 2013 at the age of 21. "One of
the girls kept asking for water. The men did not
like it so they threw her out in the desert in Libya.
They left her and we continued the journey. They
told the boss on the phone that she was killed by
terrorists. We were not human beings. We were
animals."
Once girls are trafficked across the desert, they
are then taken to "keepers", who often rape them
before they cross to Europe.
"When we got to Libya they put us in a house,"
says Sarah. "This is when I knew we would not
be working in a supermarket. One man was
taking care of us. He would have sex with us,
rape us. Then I became pregnant."
Women who insist they will not work as
prostitutes are tied up in a position called "the
crocodile". Their hands tied to their feet, they are
left for days with no food or water. Some are left
to die as an example to others.
Keepers often get the women pregnant prior to
making the crossing to Spain. With a child or
pregnant, they stand a better chance of not being
deported, and the men can use access to the
child as a form of blackmail to keep the women
under control.
Two years ago, at a time when the coyotes
reported Libya had become too dangerous,
recorded phone calls show that the girls were
taken instead to Greece, via Yemen, Iran and
Turkey. And today, as the Mediterranean becomes
more difficult to cross - and the authorities try
harder to detect traffickers - the SEC has begun
to use airports in the UK more frequently.
"This is a more expensive option for the group,"
Cortes tells me. "They use forged documents and
passports from Nigeria to fly into places like
Gatwick. The language is also easier for them.
These documents are expensive though and need
co-operation of people working in the government
to get."
One evening in Barcelona, I head out with the
undercover surveillance team. At around 10pm,
plain-clothes officers in an unmarked car drive me
to Badalona on the edge of the city.
We are taken to a top-floor flat where police have
spent hundreds of hours watching the house
opposite. A light is on in the window and
shadows move between the curtains, before
someone appears on the balcony - a madame.
Most of the women that make it to Europe live in
flats with a few other women and their madame -
almost always a trafficked woman, who has
managed to pay off her debt. Girls arrive knowing
they must earn a sum, which may be from 30,000
to 60,000 euros (£22,000 to £44,000), before they
will be free.
There are two ranks of madame. Lower-ranking
madames prowl the streets - many on la Rambla,
the main tourist strip in the centre of Barcelona -
constantly texting and calling their girls to check
on their whereabouts. Girls are told to earn about
500 euros (£370) a night to stay in the madame's
good books.
But clients, mostly tourists, may pay as little as
20 euros (£15) for sex, so this is often
impossible.
After a night's work, girls return home and divide
their earnings into three. One part goes to pay for
the flat, the second to pay for food and the third
goes to the SEC. If they are not earning enough
or refuse to work, the madames may beat them.
Higher-ranking madames collect money from their
subordinates to pass on to local SEC leaders
known as ibakkas . Always men, the ibakkas run
the whole operation. They facilitate payment
through the hawala system - a form of money
transfer based on trust and one that is difficult to
trace.
bakkas make sure that if any of their girls step
out of line, their families back home are
threatened. Family members have been known to
be abducted and "disappeared" when girls refuse
to pay their madames.
One woman, Jessica, who was trafficked to Spain
in 2009, says two of her daughters, now in their
early 20s, left home in Benin to escape the gang.
One is in Dubai, the other in Morocco waiting to
cross to Spain.
But in escaping one group of traffickers, they
have put themselves in the hands of another.
"In order to pay the debt, they will be prostitutes
too," says Jessica.
Tragically, this is not an isolated case.
It's a few days after the raid and Cortes seems
content. Back in the office, dressed in full
uniform, he details the large quantities of phones,
computers, fake passports and documents seized
at the time of the arrests.
Despite that, there is a hint of frustration in his
smile.
"The size of the network means those arrested
will be replaced," he says.
According to recent wire taps, one of the major
European co-ordinators of the group is looking to
restructure the gang. The ibakka, based in
London, was trying to get his 95 other European
counterparts together for a meeting.
This kind of organised crime cannot simply be
tackled locally. Arresting madames and taking
women off the streets merely increases the
demand for more women from Nigeria. This is an
organised crime group, run by men, operating
across the world. This is a network which
requires a global police response.