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I was tricked by witchcraft, alleged victim tells Gravesend man's prostituition smuggling trial

Canterbury Crown Court
Canterbury Crown Court

A teenager who claims she was lured to Kent by a man using witchcraft to control her has today told a jury of the moment she realised she had been tricked.

The 17-year-old Nigerian girl has alleged the man behind the human trafficking plot was a former security guard from Gravesend.

Osezua Elvis Osolase, 42, of Beaumont Drive, has denied 13 offences of trafficking, rape, false imprisonment and sexual activity with a child.

The girl wept as she alleged at Canterbury Crown Court she overheard Osolase – who she knew as Victor – bartering over the phone and demanding €70,000 for her.

"He didn’t know I was there," she said. "When I heard the man mention money, my mind said that I should stay still.

"The man said: 'The first girl I brought for you, you gave me €60,000. Now this one I have got here you have (offered) to give me another €60,000.' He said that was too small. He said the man should give him €70,000 and they agreed on €65,000."

The prosecution has alleged Osolase had brought the girls to the UK for prostitution in Italy.

The girl claimed she had been tricked into coming to the UK when "Victor" had promised to send her to school.

In Lagos, the teenager claims she was taken to a house of witchcraft and made to go through a juju ritual involving her being made to drink a native port – which "looked like it contained blood".

"There were many men there and they had red clothes tied around their chests. I was afraid because the place was a place of juju. One of the men then cut my hair and cut hair from my armpits and took fingernails and toenails and take my blood from my right hand.

"As this was happening I was looking at Victor. He said: 'No problem'. When they had finished they asked me why I had been brought there. I told him no.

"The man then said that if I finished school in the UK I would be able to pay him back and I would not run away. He did this oath so that I would not run away.

"my mother's friend had used me as a slave and this was the same thing this man was going to do to me, i started to beg him but he would not listen…” – osolase's alleged victim

"He made me look into a mirror and I was afraid. He told me he did that so I would believe everything that was happening, so I would realise this was not a fake.

"He told me that if I told anyone I would die."

Once in England, the youngster was told she was being sent to Italy.

She added: "I was surprised. I said to him: 'But I thought you said that I would go to school?' And after school I would repay you.

"I begged him. I said that I had been suffering in Nigeria for what I had already been made to do. My mother's friend had used me as a slave and this was the same thing this man was going to do to me, I started to beg him but he would not listen."

The girl had earlier told the jury of her life in Nigeria in a recorded interviewed played to the jury.

The teenager told how she had lived in a village without electricity and running water with her parents who both died.

She said she was then sent to live with a number of people who beat her, scolded with a hot iron and stabbed with a broken plate.

The youngster said that while living with a nurse she was repeatedly raped by the husband and then kicked out when she became pregnant.

Speaking through an interpreter, the girl, who spoke broken English, said that by 2010 she was begging on the streets of Lagos, living under a bridge where she was raped by five boys.

The trial, which is expected to last eight weeks, continues.

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