Nigerian Pastor On Trial For Sex Slavery
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Sporting untrimmed sideburns and winter jacket, while still managing to look unruffled and as cool as you’d like, 35-year-old Pastor Stanley Omoregie looks the Judge straight in the eye and beckons on God to strike him dead.
The pastor is currently standing trial in a Lyon court in France and he has just denied charges bordering on aggravated pimping and slavery.
"May God kill me now if a girl has worked for me,” Omoregie swears, ashen-faced and defiant all at once.
He speaks flawless French, which he considers being the fruit of successful integration, as he denies the accusation of being involved in running a prostitution racket and trafficking young girls from Nigeria to Europe.
In the transcript of a conversation submitted to the court, Omoregie is heard saying he wanted "those with beautiful bodies, who can be controlled, not those that cause problems."
A family-based sex syndicate
The prosecution has presented Omoregie as the kingpin of a family-based syndicate made up of 10 women and 14 men, including one of Europe's most wanted women, Jessica Edosomwan.
Edosomwan has been accused of recruiting destitute women in Nigeria for the sex trade in Lyon, Nimes and Montpellier.
Believed to be on the run in the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg) countries, Italy or Germany, Edosomwan is set to be tried in absentia.
It took months of police wiretapping and surveillance before Omoregie and other suspected members of his cartel were arrested.
The Lyon investigation covers an entire gamut of sex trafficking activities--from iron-fisted "madams" and violent pimps to drivers of the vans in which the women perform sexual acts, and to those tasked with laundering the proceeds of the trafficking, according to an AFP report on the development.
Prosecutors estimate that 17 alleged victims, aged 17 to 38, made up to 150,000 euros ($166,000) a month for the syndicate by selling sex for as little as 10 euros.
Working with juju
According to a United Nations estimate, 80 per cent of young Nigerian women who arrive Italy -- their first port of call in Europe -- already belong in prostitution networks, or quickly fall under their control.
Investigators say most of the women come from Benin City, the capital of Nigeria's southern Edo State.
AFP describes Edo State as a “human trafficking hotbed with a long history of dispatching women and men to Europe to earn money to send back home.”
Some of the arrested women take part in "juju" or black magic rituals before leaving Nigeria.
During the juju rituals, they often promise to repay the money they owe for their passage to Europe.
Most of the women arrive in Europe after making the perilous migrant trail across the Sahara Desert to Libya and then across the Mediterranean.
They arrive in Italy before winding up in Lyon.
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