By Osagie Alonge
A number of UK residents have written to the Home Secretary Theresa May in London to prevent a Nigerian pastor Helen Ukpabio from returning to the United Kingdom following allegations her preaching might put children under risk.
Ukpabio who is popularly called ‘witch hunter’ is the founder of the controversial Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries. The born-again Christian Pentecostal preacher claims to have been engaged to Satan when she was a teenager but was rescued from a cult at the age of 17.
The Calabar-born now specializes in liberating captives in ‘deliverance sessions’. ‘If a child under the age of two screams in the night, cries and is always feverish with deteriorating health, he or she is a servant of Satan’, Ukpabio is quoted as saying.
The Independent reports that ‘campaigners say such beliefs, prevalent in some parts of the developing world, can put children’s safety at risk. They have written to Ms May to urge that the pastor be banned from the UK after the current tour’.
Ukpabio founded the church in 1992 in Calabar, Nigeria. It now claims to have 150 branches worldwide.
