Reggio Calabria: Nigerian mafia boss sentenced. Voodoo rites and enslavement
December 16, 2023
The Court of Assizes of Reggio Calabria has sentenced one of the alleged leaders of the Nigerian mafia in Italy to 26 years in prison. Favour Obazelu, known as "Fred" or "Friday", aged 44, at the end of the first degree trial, was in fact found guilty of criminal conspiracy, enslavement, human trafficking, kidnapping and sexual violence. Already convicted of mafia association by the Court of Bari, Obazelu was arrested by the Reggio Calabria flying squad in February 2022 as part of an investigation coordinated by the prosecutor Giovanni Bombardieri.The prosecutor, during the indictment, this morning had even asked for a sentence one year less than that given to the accused accused of having brought a Nigerian girl to Italy in 2014. Obazelu had promised the woman a job in a bar. According to the investigations, however, he had forced her into prostitution to repay the debt she had been kidnapped in an apartment in Bari, he raped her and made her pregnant and then kicked her out of the house, preventing her from taking her documents with her and also her son born from the rape of her suffered by her tormentor . According to investigators, together with a brother and other people in Libya and Nigeria, the forty-four-year-old Nigerian recruited girls from his homeland to be led by deception to Italy. As prosecutor Amerio explained during her speech, the victims were tied using a voodoo ritual and kept in a state of complete psychological prostration before being introduced to prostitution. One of them reported him an d told investigators that she had been subjected to a black magic ritual in Nigeria to bind her to respect the commitment to pay the sum of 25 thousand euros. According to the prosecutor's investigations, there would have been a real ceremony in which the girl, then twenty-one years old, and her family were threatened with death if they broke the oath.