The Telegraph – U.K. | Adrian Blomfield, Africa Correspondent | Oct. 17, 2019
Police have freed hundreds of manacled boys from a madrassa in northern Nigeria for the third time in a month, raising fears of systemic torture and sexual abuse in the region’s Islamic schools.
Officers leading a raid on the Mal Niga school in the city of Katsina late on Wednesday found more than 500 boys and young men, many of whom had been chained to walls, molested and beaten.
The discovery followed a pattern that has become grimly familiar in Nigeria’s mostly Muslim north. More than 1,200 males, some as young as five, have been freed in three police operations since late September.
In all three cases, many were found to have been beaten, starved, sexually abused and held in chains, sometimes for so long that they were unable to walk unaided after their rescue.