By Olumide Adesida
An Ivorian, Ali Ouattara has been arrested by security operatives in Spain for allegedly trying to smuggle his 8-year-old son, Adou Ouattara into the country.
Adou, who was found curled up inside a suitcase without air vents last month, precisely on May 7, 2015 at a Spanish border, was reunited with his mother on Monday, June 8, 2015. The family’s lawyer, Juan Isidro Fernandez Diaz had told journalists: ‘We are very happy. We’ll set off again with the little one and we’ll try to find his father.’
Police in Ceuta made the discovery and since then, the boy had been staying at a centre for under aged migrants in Ceuta. The suitcase containing Adou was being carried through a pedestrian border crossing by a 19-year-old woman, whose identity has not been released when a security scanner detected the boy.
Several hours after the boy was detected, his father, Ali Ouattara was arrested at the border crossing on charges of ‘human rights abuse’ for trying to have the boy smuggled into the Spain.
‘We have paid the bail and they’re going to release him,’ the family’s lawyer said.
Officials granted Adou authorisation to live in Spain for one year and had been waiting for results of DNA tests before turning him over to his mother, Lucie Ouattara, who lives legally in Spain’s Canary Islands, off the Moroccan coast.
See more photos…
