Some victims of human trafficking, who paid millions of naira to travel to Canada, were at the Lagos Office of NAPTIP on Thursday to collect their passports.
The passports were recovered by officials of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP) from some suspected traffickers.
NAPTIP sources said that about 18,000 people were victims of the traffickers, who collected various sums of money ranging from N200,000 to N2 million, to take them to Canada, to work.
“We got some petitions about the activities of the syndicate and we investigated the issue. Our investigation showed that the suspects were recruiting people, including workers, students and business persons, promising them jobs in Canada.
“We have arrested some suspects, while the main suspect, who paraded himself before the victims as a travel agency manager, escaped when NAPTIP came into the case. NAPTIP was, however, able to recover all the passports of the victims.
“We sent out information to the victims to come and collect their passports within a given period, which expired in the first week of November.
“The people around our gates are those who did not come within the specified time and they will now collect theirs from the immigration office,” the source said.
Some of the victims said that they did not get to know of the announcement on time.
“We were told to get ready to travel within three days, before we heard that the suspect was a human trafficker.
“I did not believe what I was hearing because I have paid about N500,000 to enable me to go and work in Canada. I never believed the suspect wanted to traffic us,” said one of the victims, who did not disclose his name.
Another victim, who claimed to have resigned from his banking job, said that if the suspect was actually a human trafficker, he would have probably used some charms on them.
Meanwhile, some food vendors have turned the NAPTIP gate to makeshift restaurants, as the victims milled around the gate, trying to buy food from them.