A former US intelligence analyst warned the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) to investigate the activities of a senior Nigerian politician before he trafficked a man to London in an attempt to harvest his kidney, the Guardian can reveal.
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On Friday, Ike Ekweremadu was sentenced to more than nine years in prison for being the driving force in a plot to harvest a kidney for his sick daughter in the first organ trafficking conviction under the Modern Slavery Act.
Matthew Page, a Nigeria expert at the US state department’s bureau of intelligence and research from 2012 t0 2016 and now an associate fellow at the Chatham House thinktank, said the plot could have been foiled if UK authorities had acted on his warnings about Ekweremadu and a dossier of material about his activities in Britain.
He said the trafficking conspiracy showed what could happen if such documented suspicions about corruption were ignored.
“Clearly the UK authorities had ample opportunity to scrutinise Ekweremadu’s UK activities before things reached the point of people-trafficking or organ harvesting,” he said.
In research partly funded by the UK’s Department for International Development, Page examined how Nigerian politicians including Ekweremadu used unexplained wealth to buy millions of pounds’ worth of properties in the UK and fund expensive private education for their children.
He found that in a 12-year period, Ekweremadu would have made about £339,000 as a political office holder, including his stint as deputy president of the Nigerian senate. But in that period he bought three properties – two in London and one in Cambridge – worth £4.2m. The Old Bailey heard that Ekweremadu had an international property portfolio worth more than £6m.
Source-Nairaland Forum
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