Nigerian police have rescued more than 100 children from child traffickers over the past three days.
Police said they arrested a woman yesterday after she was caught trying to take 56 children from Mokwa, a remote town in the central Niger state, to work as domestic servants in the commercial hub Lagos.
The children were crammed into a truck used for transporting frozen food, although the refrigeration was not switched on.
"The woman said she brought them with the consent of their parents to be distributed as house-helps in Lagos," a police spokesman said.
The children were detained in a police station in the Ajegunle area of Lagos. A crowd of more than a hundred people, some apparently associates of the suspects, gathered at the gates, harassing journalists.
On Friday, 52 children from Togo were freed on Nigeria's western border with Benin by border police, authorities said. Four traffickers, including a man who said he was a pastor at a pentecostal church, were arrested.
Thousands of children are trafficked every year across Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, where there is a tradition among families in impoverished, rural areas to send children to the cities in the hope of a better life.
A government survey in 2003 estimated there were 15 million children engaged in child labour in Nigeria, and 40 per cent of them were at risk of being trafficked for domestic and forced labour, prostitution, entertainment, pornography, armed conflict and ritual killing.
Nigeria passed a ground-breaking law against human trafficking in 2003, but its law enforcement and judicial systems are unable to cope with a growing number of cases.