Nigerian medical couple facing trial in UK for enslaving man for 24 yrs

A 60-year-old Nigerian- UK based doctor, Emmanuel Edet, and his wife, Antan Edet, a 58-year-old a senior hospital nurse, are currently facing trial in Britain for allegedly smuggling a young man named  Mr. Ofonime Inukinto London and turning him into their slave in their home for 24 years.

Mr. Inuk now 39 says he started living with the couple as a houseboy in Lagos at the age of 12 before the family moved to Israel while he was 14.  The medical couple later moved to London with him by changing his name to their surname and falsely adding him to their passports, it is alleged.

Inuk, an orphan and eldest child in a family of 8 children escaped from his captor’s home in 2013 when the duo traveled to Nigeria for Christmas. He explained his ordeal at the Edet’s to the jury’s at the Harrow Crown Court.

Inuk told a jury at Harrow Crown Court he had to sleep on the floor and was barred from using many rooms except to clean them. He described how he was scared of the couple after realising they would not pay him or send him to school.

The jury was told Mr Inuk escaped after hearing about another case in the media while the couple travelled to Nigeria for Christmas. He contacted a charity which tipped off police who were stunned to find him alone in their £450,000 four-bedroom terrace home in Perivale, monitored by a CCTV camera. 

Mr Inuk also told the jury he slept on the kitchen floor on a dirty foam mattress thrown out by a hospital. He was expected to get up first and begin cleaning the house, but was told to sweep instead of using a vacuum cleaner because it was too noisy.

He was also forced to wash clothes by hand because the Edets said it was too expensive to run the washing machine. 

‘Over a period in excess of 20 years they have deprived him of his identity, his rights to education and freedom of movement and the money he should have received. He has no means of returning to Nigeria. He was entirely dependent on them.’

At one stage he tried to undertake a college course in computer skills but the Edets stopped him, it is claimed. Mr Smart said: ‘When he did not meet their exacting standards, they hit him and punched him – he recalls this particularly clearly in relation to his trying to apply for college,” prosecutor Roger Smart told the Crown Court jury.

In a police interview, he said he was known as a ‘house boy’, adding: ‘My role is to stay in the house ... I always do everything in the house, sir … clean, cook, wash car, the gardening, ironing … or maybe like a slave. That’s called slavery.’

The case has continues…