In pictures .. 300 students were raped and chained in a school in Nigeria

Police in Nigeria have rescued more than 300 students, including minors, who were tortured and sexually abused at a religious school in Kaduna, northern Nigeria, police said Friday.

During a raid Thursday on a headquarters in the Regasa neighborhood, police found more than 300 students of "different nationalities" imprisoned and enrolled in a boarding school, which the media called the "house of terror."

Kaduna state police spokesman Yakoku Sabo told AFP that school officials were forcing young people to live in "degrading and inhumane humanitarian conditions in the name of teaching and reforming the Koran."

The owner and his six aides were arrested, Sabo said.

"We found about 100 pupils, including nine-year-old children, in a small room in the name of repairing them and making them able to take responsibility," Sabo said.

"The victims were mistreated. "Some of them announced that they were raped by their teachers."

In pictures published by Nigerian media, a child appears to have wounds in his back, apparently as a result of skin, another with chains on iron bars, and a group of young men gathered in a dirty room.

In other pictures, children rescued with meager faces and dozens of them boarded minibuses headed to the municipality's stadium, before joining with their belongings to a pilgrim camp near the airport, local sources told AFP.

Police also found a "torture chamber" in which the students were chained and beaten when their teachers said they had made a mistake.

The raid was carried out after repeated complaints from residents living nearby, who felt that something unusual was happening inside the school.

"The victims are of various nationalities, and two of them confirmed during their interrogation that their parents brought them there from Burkina Faso," the spokesman said.

One of the youths, according to several local newspapers, Belo Hamza, confirmed that he was planning to go to South Africa to study mathematics when his family sent him to the House of Terror three months ago.

"They claim to teach us the Koran and Islam, but they have done many things here," Hamza said. They are forced to have sex, ”he said.“ Those who tried to escape were subjected to harsh punishment: they tied it and hung it from the ceiling. ”

“During my stay here, one of them was killed after being tortured. Others were previously killed because of illness or torture. "They feed us very little and eat only twice a day."

The school, which opened ten years ago, welcomes students brought by their families to learn the Koran, as well as to correct the course of delinquents or drug addicts.

"Here they keep drug traffickers, thieves, homosexuals and all kinds of people," student Abdullah Hamza told AFP. "Those who were caught trying to escape were chained."

The families of some of the victims of the residents of Kaduna, who were summoned by the police, expressed their "shock" when they learned about what happened to their children, stressing that they were completely unaware of the circumstances they lived through, according to a police spokesman.

Parents were regularly preparing food for their children and were allowed to see them once every three months.

"Parents were not allowed to enter the building to see what was going on inside," Sabo said.

On the private Channel Channel television, one school official stressed that the goal was only to teach the Koran and that those who were chained were "trying" to escape.