{"id":72813,"date":"2025-08-11T15:34:22","date_gmt":"2025-08-11T15:34:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/?p=72813"},"modified":"2025-08-11T15:34:22","modified_gmt":"2025-08-11T15:34:22","slug":"ekweremadu-trafficking-victim-loses-dad-two-years-after-ordeal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/2025\/08\/11\/ekweremadu-trafficking-victim-loses-dad-two-years-after-ordeal\/","title":{"rendered":"Ekweremadu: Trafficking Victim Loses Dad Two Years After Ordeal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Onyeanya Ebere Immaculata<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The father of David Nwamini Ukpo, the Nigerian youth trafficked to the United Kingdom by Senator Ike Ekweremadu for an illegal kidney transplant, has died, with the family attributing his death to heartbreak after years of no contact with his son.<\/p>\n<p>Boniface Nwamini Ukpo, a son of the deceased, confirmed to reporters on Monday that his father died around 12 p.m. on Sunday.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s so sad that since the incident happened in 2022, we have not spoken with my brother, David Nwamini,\u201d he said. \u201cMy father has been sick over the saga, and yesterday he finally died.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The family said they have not heard from David since he was taken to the UK in 2022 for the transplant procedure.<\/p>\n<p>Senator Ekweremadu, his wife Beatrice, and their doctor, Obinna Obeta, were convicted in March 2023 by a London court for conspiring to traffic David from Lagos to the UK to harvest his kidney for the senator\u2019s ailing daughter.<\/p>\n<p>According to the UK\u2019s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), Ekweremadu was sentenced to nine years and eight months in prison, while his wife received four and a half years.<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Obeta, described as the middleman in the plot, was jailed for 10 years.<\/p>\n<p>The case was the first conviction for illegal organ harvesting under the UK\u2019s Modern Slavery Act.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Onyeanya Ebere Immaculata The father of David Nwamini Ukpo, the Nigerian youth trafficked to the United Kingdom by Senator Ike Ekweremadu for an illegal kidney transplant, has died, with the family attributing his death to heartbreak after years of no contact with his son. Boniface Nwamini Ukpo, a son of the deceased, confirmed to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":72814,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[172,186],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72813"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72815,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72813\/revisions\/72815"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/72814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}