Child labourers rescued from Nigerian quarries

Ragged, exhausted and scarred, 74 children apparently sold into bondage were on their way home on Thursday after being rescued from Nigerian granite quarries.

The children, some just four years old, told aid workers at least 13 of their companions had died and been buried in shallow graves after succumbing to beatings, hunger, illness and exposure in the pits near the south-western Nigerian city of Abeokuta.

"We would break the stones and the men would come take them away in trucks," one skinny and heavily scratched boy told reporters.

Trafficked from the neighbouring country of Benin, the group represents a tiny proportion of the estimated 6 000 child labourers indentured in Nigeria.

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