October 13, 2018
Charlotte - A U.S. Army reservist accused of running a sex trafficking (click here) enterprise in North Carolina has been convicted by a federal jury.
The Department of Justice said in a news release Friday that 29-year-old Xaver M. Boston of Charlotte was found guilty of six counts of sex trafficking and one related charge.
The news release says Boston served in the U.S. Army as a reserve military policeman.
Prosecutors say Boston's four victims were all struggling with opioid addictions, and he promised them drugs and a place to live. They say he then advertised them for prostitution, collected the proceeds for himself and used drugs to coerce them.
Boston is in custody and will be sentenced later. Each sex trafficking charge carries a minimum sentence of 15 years in prison.
October 14, 2018
An acclaimed US charity (click here) operating in Liberia has admitted to major failings after girls at a school set up to save them from a life of sexual exploitation were systematically raped.
“We are profoundly, deeply sorry,” the charity More Than Me said on its website on Saturday after US investigative media said girls at a pioneering school in a slum had been repeatedly abused by the charity’s co-founder, Macintosh Johnson.
Johnson eventually died of AIDS and there are fears that he infected some of his victims — who were aged as young as 10 — with the HIV virus which causes AIDS, the investigative site ProPublica said in a lengthy investigative piece co-published with Time....
October 14, 2018
By Emma Nnadozie and Esther Onyegbula
This interview was conducted amid a mild drama (click here) that ensued right at the office of the Controller of Immigration at Seme border in Lagos.
While the Immigration boss, Dom Asogwa, was gearing up to answer our first question, his men informed him of the arrest of five young Nigerian girls travelling to Ghana without valid documents.
...When I came, I discovered that people were being smuggled to Ghana, Togo, Mali, etc. I said I won’t encourage smuggling and trafficking of humans from this axis. I discussed with my officers and we agreed that it is a task that must be done. I had to come up with a strategy to curtail irregular migration from this flank.
And I can tell you that since I resumed here, I have reasonably stopped people from travelling especially when their mission is undefined and in doubt, you don’t have genuine travelling documents; why you are going to where you are going? I have drastically stopped people without travelling documents from this flank from going to Ghana, Togo, Mali, Cote d’Ivoire for prostitution. We have also reunited those coming back from Ghana, Mali, Libya, victims of human smuggling with their families....
