London probe focuses on 300 missing boys; child trafficking, witchcraft may be factors

LONDON — Even by the standards of a river that has known more than its share of death in gruesome and macabre fashions, the discovery was startling.

In September 2001, in the River Thames near the soaring columns of Tower Bridge, the police discovered the torso — headless and limbless — of a black-skinned child they called, for want of any definitive identity, Adam. The suggestion from subsequent investigations was that he had died in some kind of ritualistic murder linked to West African witchcraft.

Now, more than three years later, the discovery has brought another chilling fact to light: In the three months before the body was found, 300 other black boys between 4 and 7 years of age were missing or unaccounted for. The disclosure may have cast a rare spotlight into a secretive world of child trafficking that authorities seem unable to control or prevent, according to experts on the issue.

"We were really looking at black children, black male children, aged between 4 and 7, and we found 300 of those that couldn't be accounted for," Detective Chief Inspector Will O'Reilly told British radio on Friday. "It was one of the lines of inquiry we had to follow up. In the main these were African children. I think there were one or two from the Caribbean.

"It is a large figure, far more than we anticipated when we started this line of inquiry."

What happened to the boys remains a mystery. While the police said they had no evidence of murder, they also acknowledged that the absence of immigration records prevented the authorities from tracing the missing youngsters.

Even the fate of Adam, whose torso was found clad in a pair of orange shorts, has defied a full explanation.

When the police discovered his body in 2001, they found it had been skillfully butchered and drained of blood. Forensic tests found a poisonous bean in his stomach and traces of crushed bone and clay pellets studded with fragments of gold and quartz in his lower intestine.

Other inquiries, led by O'Reilly, suggested that the boy came from a rural area of southwestern Nigeria. Police officers investigating the killing also traveled to South Africa to try to establish whether his death might have been linked to killings associated with witchcraft. Even Nelson Mandela, South Africa's former president, became involved, issuing an appeal for an end to sacrificial killing.

In 2003, police questioned Joyce Osagiede, a Nigerian asylum-seeker, who said her husband had murdered 11 children as part of a demonic cult.

O'Reilly said the police questioned people who were supposed to be taking care of the missing children and were often told that they had returned to Africa. "We asked through Interpol for police to make inquiries in the local countries to which they returned," he said. "In the majority of cases, we got no reply on that."

Only two of the missing children were traced, he said.

It is not unusual for African parents to send children to Britain and other places to be looked after by relatives and sent to school. But the people who look after them, called private carers, are not obliged to register.

Yinka Sunmonu, an author and journalist, said some of the children were badly exploited and abused.

Felicity Collier, head of the British Association for Adopting and Fostering, said: "We know there are thousands of children who are missing. We know there are children being passed between adults.

"We would not accept this as a society if these were white children," she added. "We have to have a law in this country that says private foster carers have to register."