UK nurse is first person convicted under modern slavery laws

Prosecutors said the Voodoo rituals gave Iyamu crushing psychological control over the women, who were too afraid to challenge her or to fail to pay her back tens of thousands of euros she charged them to be trafficked into Germany.
Jurors also convicted Iyamu of perverting the course of justice by arranging for relatives of the complainants in Nigeria to be arrested. Her husband, Efe Ali-Imaghodor, 60, was acquitted of doing acts intending to pervert the course of justice.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) said Iyamu forced victims to take oaths that bound their loyalty to her on pain of death.
Iyamu, who was made a British citizen in 2009 and worked as an NHS agency nurse, declared a modest income of around £14,500 in 2016-17. But inquiries after Iyamu’s arrest in 2017 found she was able to spend thousands on international air travel and to afford a large home in Benin City in Nigeria.
Opening the case at the start of the trial, the prosecutor Simon Davis told jurors: “Josephine Iyamu had a network of people who assisted her with trafficking the women from Nigeria overland to Libya – across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy and from Italy up and into Germany.