Concern mounted yesterday over the welfare of scores of suspected child slaves said to be on board a ship which has been roaming the West African coast for more than two weeks.
The ship, whose whereabouts are unknown after it was turned back from Gabon and Cameroon, is thought to be carrying 180 children caught up in a lucrative trade in minors sold by poor families and forced to work abroad on plantations or as servants.
It was expected to arrive in Benin late yesterday.
Benin's Social and Women's Affairs Minister, Mrs Ramatou Baba-Moussa, said authorities in Benin were seeking to question a businessman and two associates over the alleged transportation of children for slave labour. Mrs Baba-Mousa said the businessman had been identified as Mr Staneslas Abatan. She said he had been asked to return to Benin from Gabon where he had apparently been waiting for the Nigerian registered ship to unload its human cargo. Two of his associates were already in Benin and were in touch with the authorities, she said.
The minister said shipping and port officials would be held answerable if any were found to have been aware of the shipment of children for sale aboard.
"We will expect them to answer for this," she said.
Aid workers said they had received reports from police and port authorities in Cameroon, the last to see the ship before it set out for Cotonou on Thursday, that some children on board were sick.
"We are very concerned. Reports from police authorities in Cameroon say there are many, many children on board and some of them are sick," Ms Estelle Guluman of the United Nations children's fund (Unicef) in Cotonou said.
"We don't know where the boat is, but conditions on board must be very bad. The ship was only expected to go to Gabon, so it didn't carry a lot of supplies. But instead of a four-day journey, it has been at sea for more than two weeks."
Ms Guluman said government pledges to punish those guilty of trafficking children could backfire and put the children on board at even more risk.
"The captain knows full well that he will have to face the music when he gets back here, so he may have tried to offload the children in another port," she said.
She added there were unconfirmed reports the ship might head for Lagos in Nigeria, where Unicef staff were on standby.
Police authorities in Cotonou said they had alerted their counterparts in Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, in case the ship tried to dock in any of those West African countries.
"This is a dramatic and shocking situation," the Information Minister, Mr Gaston Zossou, said on Saturday.
"We condemn this practice and we must take measures to punish and discourage those responsible," he said.
Port officials said the Nigerian-registered MV Etireno had been chartered by a Benin businessman and set sail for Gabon on March 30th.
But after being turned back from Gabon and Cameroon's main port of Douala, the ship set out for Cotonou late on Thursday, and port officials said it may not complete its round trip of more than 2,000 km until late last night. Mrs Baba-Moussa said on Friday she believed there were 180 children aboard. Earlier figures put the number at 250.
Despite international efforts to curb the trade, child slavery persists in West and Central Africa, from where European slave traders shipped millions of people to the Americas from the 16th to 19th centuries.
Many child slaves from countries such as Benin, Togo and Mali end up working on plantations producing cocoa and other cash crops in Gabon and Ivory Coast.