Police officers stand with detained islamic teachers in the northern city of Kaduna, Nigeria September/Reuters
Nigerian authorities on Saturday were frantically trying to find the families of hundreds of men and boys freed from a school where some had been chained, sexually abused and tortured.
Over 400 captives were freed by police with their ages ranging from six to 50, from the house in Kaduna in northern Nigeria in a raid on Thursday.
Some were chained to radiators, tires or hub caps and others bore visible signs of scars from whippings and beatings.
More than a dozen, including 10 children, were hospitalized on Saturday. All the adults were in critical condition, with one vomiting blood.
Police set up a makeshift camp for the others at the edge of the city and were trying to register the freed captives.
In one of the buildings at the camp, children queued to register their names against a list, later laughing and playing before being served a plate of noodles.
Outside, dozens of parents, faces contorted with worry, gathered to collect their children. Some had paid tuition fees to the men running the house believing it to be an Islamic school, while others viewed it as a correctional facility with no expectation of instruction.
Kaduna state police spokesman Yakubu Sabo said the “dehumanized treatment” they discovered made it impossible to consider the house an Islamic school.
Local media said some of the children had been tortured, staved and even sexually abused.
Authorities said some of the people who were freed from the home fled immediately and therefore the numbers of those who were rescued is likely to vary.
Police raided the school after a relative was denied access to the captives. Seven people who said they were teachers at the school were arrested in the raid.
Despite the reports of abuse, some were reluctant to return home with their family members.
Islamic schools, known as Almajiris, are common across the mostly Muslim north of Nigeria.
Widespread poverty has caused many parents to take their children to such institutions with reports indicating that most have been abused with children forced to beg on the streets rather than get an education as expected.