A Bermondsey nurse who used ‘voodoo’ rituals to traffic women from Nigeria into sex slavery has had her sentence increased from fourteen to eighteen years.
Josephine Iyamu, an NHS nurse who owned a £400,000 home in Bermondsey, was jailed in July for putting her five victims through humiliating ‘juju’ ceremonies while trafficking them to Germany to work as prostitutes.
Now her original sentence has been extended to eighteen years after judges at the Court of Appeal yesterday agreed that it was too lenient.
Iyamu, 51, enlisted the services of a voodoo priest to intimidate vulnerable Nigerian women before forcing them into her sex ring.
She charged the women 38,000 Euros to arrange their travel across the Mediterranean before forcing them to pay off the debt through prostitution.
She subjected her victims to humiliating rituals including making them drink blood containing worms, eat chicken hearts and have their skin cut with razor blades.
One of the victims was forced to have an abortion when she was raped by traffickers – only for Iyamu to charge her £440 for the procedure.
The nurse, who also owned a mansion in Nigeria, was only caught after the German authorities tipped off the National Crime Agency when they identified one of her victims working in a brothel in Trier.
Iyamu was arrested by NCA officers after landing at Heathrow airport on a flight from Lagos on August 24, 2017.
She was found guilty of facilitating the travel of another person with a view to exploitation and perverting the course of justice during a ten-week trial at Birmingham Crown Court on July 4.
She is the first British national to be convicted under the Modern Slavery Act for offences committed overseas.