Families Fight to Rescue Trafficked Children Allegedly Held for Ransom in Libya and Egypt | Dawan Africa

Kenya, 5 August 2026 – Hodhan Ibrahim Omar is a devastated mother. Her Grade 10 learner Abdighafar Aden Hassan, who ended up in Egypt after being trafficked from Garissa, is unable to return home.

She paid KSh 2.3 million ransom to seemingly deep-rooted cartels who lure desperate youths with promise for better life in Europe through a desperate journey from Libya and parts of Egypt.

“I was a struggling single mother trying to raise my children when my son went missing and eventually was being held for ransom. I was so overwhelmed because I didn’t know where I would get such kind of money,” Hodhan told Dawan Africa in an interview.

She started running up and down and sometimes, she used social media to ask for well-wishers to help her rescue her first born son.

With the help of relatives and social media sympathizers, she managed to raise KSh 2,250,000

Unlike other families whose children are still in the hands of traffickers, locally known as Magafe, her son she says, disembarked from Libya bound train and ended up in Egypt where he is stranded because she doesn’t have means to have him return him home safe. This is besides having a go home letter from the authorities.

She says she believes her son was being held in Sudan and when she paid the ransom is when they embarked on a journey to Libya, but ended up in Egypt where he found a Somali family that has been hosting him.

He disappeared in December 2025 from Nairobi where he had gone to his aunt over the holidays.

The cartels have a long chain including those recruiting cells, agents to transport to their destination and those who are tasked to contact parents to ask for huge ransom.

They are also spread in different countries as per families sending ransom money to different destinations.

For Instance, Hodhan paid some of the money in different installments and all of them in different countries, the first installment she paid 1,000 dollars to Dubai and another 3,500 dollars to Istanbul in Turkey.

Some of the money she said she paid through Somalia. The monies were paid through a forex bureau locally known as Hawala.

Although she is lucky to have managed to raise the funds, other families are not lucky since they are still struggling to rescue their children from the traffickers who send them video clips of them being tortured.

Iftin primary lost three girls whose parents received three identical video clips in distressing situation

In a video sent to her family in Garissa, a 16-year-old girl lies on the ground, her hands tied behind her back and bound to her legs with heavy chains and padlocks. The unseen captor whips her repeatedly.

The teenager, referred to here as *Deka because she is still an active hostage, vanished after leaving her primary school. Soon after, her captors began contacting her family, demanding an $18,000 ransom, about KSh 2.3 million.

The teenagers were lured by a well-organized syndicate that targets local school children with promises of a better life in Europe, only to smuggle them to Libya and hold them captive in harsh conditions.

According to one of the sisters of the girls, the police failed them because they said if the authorities would have acted immediately, they would have reported the matter, they would have been intercepted at the border.

The syndicate has been taking both a financial and emotional toll to communities in Garissa as almost all families have been contributing to free their relatives from the cartels (Magafe).

“My mother is diabetic, we have been struggling with her medication, where are we going to get the KSh 2.5 million they are asking for?” she said amidst sobbing.

*Halima Abdi, not her real name, has been receiving distressing videos of her younger brother who disappeared from her grandmother’s house in Garissa town.