NHS doctor and his wife made orphan their ‘house boy’ after seizing passport
THE 41-year-old was just 14 and an orphan when he was lured away from Nigeria with the promise of a better life in London.
But as soon as the teenager set foot inside the west London home of NHS doctor Emmanuel Edet and his wife, he was enslaved.
His passport was confiscated and for more than two decades he was forced to work 17 hours a day, cooking, cleaning and helping to raise the couple’s sons, with his bed a thin foam mattress in the hallway of the Perivale property.
Edet, 62, and his wife, Antan, 59, were sentenced to six years in prison each in 2015 after being convicted of cruelty to a child under 16, servitude and assisting unlawful immigration.
Mr Inuk, now 41, became scared of the couple after realising they would not pay him or send him to school.
But with no official paperwork, no money and nowhere else to go, he had no choice but to stay.
In a police interview, he said he was known as a “house boy”, adding:
“My role is to stay in the house ... I always do everything in the house, sir … clean, cook, wash car, the gardening, ironing … or maybe like a slave. That’s called slavery.”
Mr Inuk, who has suffered psychological trauma as a result of his mistreatment, was finally rescued after hearing the name of a slavery charity on the radio one day and managing to contact them.
He said: “I just worked from when I woke up to when I went to bed.
“I’m not going to get my life back, it’s gone now.”