Sonya explained the circumstances under which she became acquainted with the Nigerian youth: "Three years ago, by pure accident, I happened to see a small child who looked neglected and was wandering aimlessly in the street. It was obvious that he was in serious distress. I gave him something to eat and I tried to find out where he was from, if he had any family, if he had anyone who could look after him. Despite the communication difficulties, I was able to understand that he was from Nigeria and that he had come here with his mother to find his father. A few days after their arrival in Israel, his mother vanished and he found himself completely on his own."

Sonya, who continued to remain in contact with Utcho, provided him with material assistance and, through him, met some Nigerian migrant workers who took pity on the boy and decided to help him.

According to Joy, Utcho was born and raised in an area of southeast Nigeria that is inhabited by the Ibo people. In this region, most of the inhabitants, like Joy and Utcho, are Christian. In Nigeria, he lived with his mother, with no father or siblings. As he grew older, the boy suffered because he had no father. Children at school, he told Joy, picked on him and made life miserable for him. Tormented by his schoolmates, Utcho began to insist that his mother tell him who his father was and take him to see him.

One day, Joy continued, the mother felt she could not stand her son's badgering any longer. Three years ago, she took Utcho with her to Israel, entering through Egypt. The plan was for them to find her husband and his father. The two arrived in Tel Aviv, but after a few days, the mother simply disappeared, leaving the young boy with no identification papers and no means of support.

"One Saturday, when I and a few other Nigerians were playing soccer, a young boy joined us," Johnny, a migrant worker from Nigeria who lives in central Israel, recalled this week. "Much to our surprise, he spoke our language, the language of the Ibos, which is not used by the other inhabitants of Nigeria."

"The boy," continued Johnny, "told us his name was Utcho, and told us his story. We felt sorry for him and decided that we would take him under our wing. He began living with Nigerian families, switching families every few months. That is how we shared the burden of taking care of him. After all, we are not rich people. He lived in my house for almost four months. He moved in with us after the person he had been living with was arrested by the police and deported back to Nigeria. He has, for the past few weeks, been living with Joy, who is not married and has no children."

Utcho was arrested on Tuesday, December 30, on a street in South Tel Aviv. When he spoke with Joy and Johnny on the telephone, he told them that he was an inmate in a prison in the Negev. Afterward it emerged that the prison was the Tzohar detention facility, operated in southern Israel by the Immigration Police. Joy, Johnny and other Nigerians who know Utcho did not visit him in prison. "The prison is too far away for us and, besides, we are afraid that the police might arrest us on our way to the prison or back." Even volunteers who work with various organizations that try to help migrant workers do not travel to Tzohar. Nor are they present at the hearings where these migrant workers appear before a special court that monitors the police custody arrangements for illegal residents.

Conflicting versions

In the wake of the inquiries made by Sonya and Joy, volunteers from the Hotline for Migrant Workers, another advocacy group for migrant workers in Israel, repeatedly requested from both the director of the Interior Ministry's enforcement department in Ramle and the legal adviser of the Immigration Police that Utcho be released from police custody on the grounds that he is a minor.

The Hotline for Migrant Workers received no written reply, but was told over the phone that the Immigration Police had the authority to arrest minors as well as adults. They also heard that attorney Hannah Zichel, who monitors police custody arrangements, had interviewed Utcho and authorized his remaining in police custody until his deportation to Nigeria.

"I was not persuaded," she stated, "that there were any special humanitarian reasons in this case that justified his being released on bail."

In the minutes she recorded following that interview, Zichel noted that Utcho had no passport, but she did not mention his age. She claimed that he told her in the interview: "I entered Israel on a tourist visa in 2000 and I stayed here in order to find work. I knew that it was illegal for me to work here, but I needed the money. I understand that I am going to be deported and I want to return to my country as quickly as possible. I am waiting for my flight home. I have no passport."

This week, the director of the crisis intervention center at the Hotline for Migrant Workers, Emmy Saar, again applied to both the Interior Ministry's offices in Ramle and the Immigration Police, drawing their attention to the fact that the candidate for deportation was a minor who had come to Israel as a child and who had no one in Nigeria - no relatives, no friends, not even one acquaintance - who could help him get by in that country, where life is very difficult, even for adults.

Last Monday around noon, Utcho urgently called his acquaintances from prison and told them that prison guards had informed him that he was to be deported to Nigeria the next day. That evening, Immigration Police officers transferred him to the detention facility at Ben-Gurion International Airport in Lod. In a telephone conversation with Haaretz from his jail cell at the airport, he claimed that the representative of the police custody court had not asked how old he was. Moreover, he denied what was recorded in the minutes of the interview - namely, that he had worked in Israel and that he had agreed to the deportation. Regarding the two conflicting versions of the interview, the response of the Interior Ministry's spokesman's office was that the ministry fully backed Zichel's version.

Furthermore, Utcho stated that the Immigration Police had not provided him with any documents whatsoever and had not given him a plane ticket. The other inmates in the detention facility added that, to the best of their knowledge, they were scheduled to be deported on Tuesday evening on a plane bound for Addis Ababa, and to be transferred from there to Lagos. The area where the Ibos live and which is Utcho's birthplace is a 24-hour bus ride away, and the roads are not safe.

The age issue

Asked for the position of both the Interior Ministry and the Immigration Police on the issue of Utcho's age, seeing that he was not in possession of any identification documents, the Interior Ministry's spokesman's office replied that, at the time of his arrest, Utcho had "not been in possession of any documents and that he did not look like a minor."

In the early hours of Tuesday morning, the Hotline for Migrant Workers' legal adviser, attorney Naomi Levenkorn, contacted the Interior Ministry and the Immigration Police as well as the chair of the Knesset committee on migrant workers, Meretz MK Ran Cohen, Interior Minister Avraham Poraz and Justice Minister Yosef Lapid, telling them Utcho's story and pointing out to them the dangers he might face as a minor in the wake of his deportation. Levenkorn reminded them of the declaration made by a senior official of the Immigration Authority, Israel Police Commander Ziva Agami Cohen, at a session of the Knesset committee on children's rights: "No minors have ever been deported when they have been unaccompanied by any adult ... The assumption is that we will comply with all the directives of the Israel Police and with the various laws pertaining to the rights of minors, including the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child."

Levenkorn insisted that "even if the Immigration Authority is determined nonetheless to deport a minor, the State of Israel is obligated to at least ensure that said minor will be accompanied during the journey by an adult and that representatives of local social services will be waiting for him in Nigeria. A deportation procedure that cannot ensure this youth a home and minimal living conditions in Nigeria could cause him serious harm, both emotionally and physically. Therefore, we request that his deportation be postponed until contact has been made with the social service authorities in his country and until it can be ensured that the minor will arrive in his country in a safe, humanitarian manner."

Early Tuesday afternoon, MK Cohen spoke with the head of the Immigration Police, Bertie Ohayon, and asked him to postpone Utcho's deportation for a few days in order to enable human rights groups and the National Council for the Child to contact both the Nigerian government and the Nigerian Embassy in Tel Aviv. Thus, the Nigerian social service authorities would be able to see to the youth's welfare and needs from the moment of his deportation from Israel until his arrival in Nigeria, and would also be able to locate members of his family, if possible.

Initially, the members of Ohayon's staff claimed there was no youth named Utcho in the Ben-Gurion detention facility. They subsequently found him, but claimed that he was 17. Thus, they stated that he was not a minor and that he would therefore be deported that very evening on the next flight, whose final stop was Lagos.

However, shortly before the plane's scheduled takeoff, the Immigration Police spokesman, Superintendent Rafi Yafeh, told Haaretz that Ohayon had been informed of a new version of the Utcho story - namely, that Utcho was a minor and that he did not know the whereabouts of any of his relatives in Nigeria. Thus, noted Yafeh, Ohayon had decided to postpone the deportation so the matter could be reviewed. The aim would be to bring the Nigerian Embassy in Israel into the picture and to arrive at a new and appropriate decision.

News of the deportation's postponement was a relief for the Nigerian and Israeli families that had taken care of Utcho and for the volunteers in the NGOs that had been involved in the affair. Utcho was transferred from the airport detention facility and sent back to Tzohar Prison.

Adi Lexer, coordinator of migrant workers cases at Kav Laoved, emphatically stated that "there was no justification for holding a minor in prison; an Israeli adoptive family should be found for him." And the head of the National Council for the Child, Dr. Yitzhak Kadman, has appealed to the Foreign Ministry, requesting them to ask the Nigerian authorities to take responsibility for Utcho if he is sent back to Nigeria.

To prevent their identification, the names of the Nigerian youth and his acquaintances have been changed.