‘I thought I’d be lynched’: Inside Nigeria’s deadly attacks for being LGBTQ+
It started when Amed matched with a man online on a popular dating app. He thought they had friends in common and so, with his guard down, he agreed to meet.
The 36-year-old lives in Nigeria. It has some of the strictest laws against homosexuality in Africa. In the northern state of Kaduna, where he was living, same sex relationships are punishable by death under Islamic law.
And so it was not until he arrived at the meeting point that Amed realised he had made a potentially fatal mistake.
The man he was meeting had brought a gang of vigilantes, wielding sticks and makeshift weapons.
“He made me believe he meant me no harm. I trusted him,” explains Amed, terror etched across his face.
“When I got there, I realised he had actually plotted against me, just to extort money from me and ‘deal with me’. That was what he said.”
Stripped naked, Amed says his attackers filmed the torture they subject him to: “They were shouting, ‘Stone him to death, stone him to death’.
“It was brutal. They were beating me as if they wanted to kill me. I was so frightened I could not even speak. I thought I was going to die,” he recalls, his voice cracking.
“I gave them all the money I had in my bank account and yet they still posted the video online and sent it to my family.”
Amed, who is living with HIV and spoke to us anonymously from hiding, now realises he was the victim of a “kito” attack.
The term is Nigerian slang for entrapment and is used to describe a surge in violent, sometimes deadly, kidnap and blackmail attacks against members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Gangs catfish and target people online using dating apps and social media accounts. Victims are entrapped, tortured and filmed in order to extort ransoms. The videos are often shared with family members and then posted online, exposing victims’ sexuality and, in some cases, their HIV status, destroying their lives.
“They were shouting, ‘Kill him, kill him. He’s an abomination, an abomination’,” says Moussa, who was also assaulted by a gang of vigilantes and living at the same shelter.
He shared footage of the attack, and in the video, he is seen stripped to his underwear, beaten with sticks and mocked as they hit him.
