She is now nicknamed "the house of horror". On Friday, September 27, Nigeria discovered with horror the existence of a Koranic school in Kaduna (north of the country) where more than 300 boys were victims of torture and rape. The police rescued them.

It was during a raid, conducted Thursday night in a house Rigasa neighborhood, that police Kaduna discovered more than 300 students and students of "different nationalities" locked up and chained.

The leaders of the establishment made them live in "inhuman and degrading conditions under the guise of teaching them the Koran and straightening them" pedagogically, explains the spokesman of the police of the State of Kaduna, Yakubu Sabo.

The owner of the establishment and his six assistants were arrested, he said.

"Torture chamber"

"We found about a hundred students, including children as young as nine, chained in a small room, with the goal of correcting and empowering them," said Yakubu Sabo, adding that "the victims were abused. ". Some said they were raped by their teachers, he added.

Some photos were broadcast in the Nigerian press. On some, we see a child with a back covered with raw wounds, obviously caused by lashes. Another has his feet chained to iron bars, and a crowd of young boys are crammed into an unhealthy yard.

A "torture chamber" was found by the police. Pupils were hung on chains and beaten when teachers thought they had done something wrong.

Repeated complaints from neighbors, who suspected that something was wrong inside the school, triggered the police raid that led to the release of the children.

"The victims were of different nationalities and two of them said during their interrogation that they had been brought by their parents from Burkina Faso," the spokesman added.

"Others were dead before"

Bello Hamza, one of the boys, quoted by several local newspapers, said he had to go to study mathematics in South Africa when his family brought him to "the house of horror", there are three month.

"They claim to teach us Qur'an and Islam, but they do a lot of things here, they force the youngest to have (reports) homosexuals," he said. "Those who tried to escape from here were punished severely: they were tied and hung from the ceiling."

"During my short stay here, someone died as a result of torture," he adds. "Others had died before because of health problems and torture, they give us very poor food and we only eat twice a day."

Strict religious instruction

The school, opened about ten years ago, hosted students brought by their families to teach them the Koran, but especially put in the right path of petty criminals, or drug users.

Largely Muslim, northern Nigeria hosts a large number of more or less formal "correctional homes" providing a strict religious education, in the absence of public facilities to take care of young people left to their own devices.

The relatives of some Kaduna victims, summoned by the police, were "shocked and horrified" when they saw the condition of their children. They had no idea what they were going through, according to the spokesperson. They regularly brought food to their children and were allowed to see them once every three months.

However, Yakubu Sabo said that parents were not allowed to enter the house to see what was going on. The children were brought outside to meet them for a brief moment.

With AFP