Doctor & Nurse Wife Jailed For Keeping Slave 25 Years In UK

photo -Former NHS obstetrician Emmanuel Edet, 61, and midwife Antan Edet, 58,

A former Walsall doctor and his nurse wife, who kept a man as a house slave for almost a quarter of a century after illegally bringing him to the UK, have both been jailed for six years.

Former NHS obstetrician Emmanuel Edet, 61, and midwife Antan Edet, 58, kept fellow Nigerian Ofonime Sunday Inuk as a “houseboy” after telling immigration officials he was their teenage son when they arrived here from Israel in 1989.

They lived in Walsall for several years from the early 1990s.

Over the next 24 years, he worked unpaid up to 17 hours a day looking after the couple’s two sons, cooking, cleaning and gardening and was forced to sleep on a hall floor.

He lived with them at several locations, including the West Midlands, and kept a diary in which he catalogued his treatment at the hands of people he called “sir” and “ma.”

He eventually managed to alert a charity to his plight after the couple went to Nigeria for Christmas in 2013 and they were arrested the following March.

Dr and Mrs Edet, from Perivale, north west London, were found guilty by a jury last month of cruelty to a child under 16, servitude and assisting unlawful immigration.

The couple were jailed for three years at Harrow Crown Court for child cruelty, six for servitude and one for the immigration offence, all to run concurrently.

The court was told that Mr Inuk became so dependent on the Edets he felt he had no choice but to stay with them.

He claimed he made several attempts to try to break away, telling the jury he spoke to a family friend, an MP, and was left feeling “a bit dejected “ when he tried to report the Edets to the police in around 2005 only to be told they could not help as it was a “family matter”.

Mr Inuk told the court his passport was confiscated and said he was told he would be deported as an illegal immigrant if he left the couple’s home.

Barristers for both the Edets argued that they suffered ill health.

The pair moved to Walsall in the early 1990s where Dr Edet lost his General Medical Council certificate and was told to leave the UK.

The Edets then moved to London in 1994. source-birminghammail