Police in Benin said yesterday they had alerted neighbouring west African countries to prevent the captain of a ship from offloading a suspected cargo of child slaves.
Concern has mounted over the whereabouts of the ship, which is believed to be carrying 180 children who have been sold into slavery by poor families and forced to work on plantations or as domestic servants. The vessel has been roaming the waters off the region's coast for more than two weeks.
"Through Interpol, we have alerted our colleagues for co-operation. . . We've given them all the information about the boat," said Mr Martin Cocou Degan, head of the police division fighting child trafficking.
"The whole coast is under surveillance," he said.
Port authorities in Benin sighted a ship on the horizon, but it turned out not to be the Nigerian-registered Etireno, which was expected to dock in Cotonou after a round trip of more than 2,000km.
Aid workers had reports from police in Cameroon's port of Douala, the last to see the ship before it set out for Cotonou on Thursday, that some children on board were sick. The ship was turned back from Cameroon and earlier from Gabon.
"We are very concerned. Reports from police authorities in Cameroon say there are many, many children on board and some of them are sick," said Ms Estelle Guluman of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Cotonou.
"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.
Benin's Information Minister, Mr Gaston Zossou, on Saturday described the situation as shocking and vowed to punish those responsible. Port officials said the ship had been chartered by a Benin businessman.
First reports put the number of children on board at 250, but Benin's Social and Women's Affairs Minister, Mrs Ramatou Baba-Moussa, said on Friday she believed there were 180.
