NIAMEY/MADRID: Niger's government spokesman said that 22 prisoner escaped this weekend during an attack on the central prison by suspected militants from the extremist group, Boko Haram, headquartered in Nigeria, Niger's larger neighbor to the south.
Minister of Justice Marou Amadou, the government's spokesman, said on national television late Sunday that among the 22 prisoners was a man named Cheibani Ould Hama, a member of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb who was first arrested in 2009 and is accused of having assassinated four Saudi Arabians and an American. Amadou said that Nigerien authorities are actively pursuing the escapees and over the weekend they opened fire on an SUV with tinted windows which refused to stop at a checkpoint. Two prison guards were killed during the escape.
Spain police smash Nigerian 'voodoo' ring Spanish police said Sunday they had broken up a ring that smuggled in women from Nigeria and forced them into street prostitution by burning them with irons and using voodoo rituals.
Police arrested six Nigerian nationals, including the suspected woman ringleader, as part of an investigation launched last year after one of the women filed a complaint with the authorities.
"The control exercised over women was total, involving verbal threats as well as physical violence and various voodoo ceremonies to terrorise them," police said in a statement.
"The ring caused them serious injury through bites or by using an iron to cause second-degree burns."
The ring recruited women in Benin City, a run-down Nigerian port, whose husbands and fathers had died and who were struggling to raise their children.
They transported the women overland to Morocco and then smuggled them on small wooden boats into Spain where they were forced to work as street prostitutes in Barcelona and Malaga.
