Seventy-five out of the 230 stranded Nigerian football fans who were in Russia for the World Cup finals have absconded, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The ministry’s spokesperson, Dr. Tope Elias-Fatile, said in Abuja that the fans absconded despite government’s efforts to repatriate them. “As at the last count, over 230 stranded Nigerians had been cleared to board an Ethiopian Airline flight to Abuja; however, only 155 boarded the flight that arrived Friday night of July 22,” he said.
The spokesperson said that the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Geoffrey Onyeama, had also made some contacts with relevant agencies to commence investigation into suspected human trafficking in the case. Some of the fans have been wrongfully told by some travel agencies in Lagos before their departure that they would secure jobs in Russia while those who were interested in career in football would get one easily.
Most of them were also advised to pass through the Russian border to countries like Poland and Ukraine from where they could transit to other parts of Europe like Germany, France and Holland. This is coming barely a week after about 155 Nigerians who were stranded in the European country were evacuated by the Nigerian government following a directive by President Muhammadu Buhari.
The stranded football fans including a nursing mother in her mid-thirties came through Ethiopian Airline flight number ET-ALP that arrived Nnamdi Azikwe International Airport Abuja at about 9.12 pm on July 20. Onyeama, recalled that some Nigerian football fans who were stranded had besieged the Embassy of Nigeria in Moscow on July 12.
The minister explained that there was also an allegation that some airline travel agents cancelled return tickets of their customers without informing them. In the tick of action at the World Cup, New Telegraph had relayed the plights of some of the Nigerians who are at the mercy of the Russian authorities as they have no means to return home while others who are either contemplating or attempting to cross Russian borders to other Euroepan countires were arrested.
