8-year Old Boy Smuggled In A Suitcase Across Spanish Border Reunites With Mother

A boy from Ivory Coast found in a suitcase at a Spanish border crossing was reunited with his mother today Monday June 8 while his dad, arrested for trying to smuggle him in, is expected to be released.

“We are very happy. We’ll set off again with the little one and we’ll try to find his father,” Juan Isidro Fernandez Diaz, the family’s lawyer, told journalists in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave north of Morocco.

Police in Ceuta had found eight-year-old Adou Ouattara curled up and covered inside a suitcase without air vents at a border checkpoint on May 7. Since then he has been staying at a centre for under age migrants in Ceuta.

Several hours after the boy was discovered, his father Ali Ouattara was arrested at the same border crossing on charges of human rights abuse, for trying to have the boy smuggled into the country.

“We have paid the bail and they’re going to release him,” the family’s lawyer said.

The suitcase containing Adou was being carried through a pedestrian border crossing by a 19-year-old woman, whose identity has not been released, when a security scanner detected the boy inside.

                                 

Last month officials granted Adou authorisation to live in Spain for one year and had been waiting for results of DNA tests before turning him over to his mother Lucie Ouattara, who lives legally in Spain’s Canary Islands off the Moroccan coast. Adou was reunited with his mother on Monday after tests proved they were related.