The Jakarta Globe, Arientha Primanita, January 23, 2009
Human traffickers are now getting brasher, no longer relying on mere trickery but resorting to kidnapping to secure their targets, National Police spokesman Abubakar Nataprawira, warned on Friday.
“Violence is the new method,” Abubakar said. “The victims are kidnapped, drugged and then sold by the kidnappers to the people who had ordered them.”
Abubakar said that regular methods employed so far by human traffickers involved enticing women in the rural regions to work in Jakarta or overseas and then forcing them into the sex industry.
Abubakar said the new “style” was revealed after a junior high school student was kidnapped by five masked men as she waited for a ride to school in Lampung on the southern tip of Sumatra island.
The girl, believed to be 15 years old, was forced into a car, given injections to render her unconscious and taken to Jakarta.
On June 7, along with three women from West Java Province, the school girl was flown to Pontianak, in West Kalimantan by a woman identified as Eka.
A man named Chong Kum Seng, better known as Kam Seng, picked the four victims at the airport and took them by bus to Entikong, a border town near the Malaysian state of Sarawak, where they were handed to another man, Nurdin.
“On June 8, 2008, Nurdin took the four women to Tebedu, Malaysia, without passports,” Abubakar said, “In Tebedu, Nurdin gave the women to Helen, an agent in Malaysia who worked with Kam Seng.”
Abubakar said Helen then brought the four women to Kuching, Malaysia, where they were forced to work as prostitutes.
The high school victim was forced to work in a place called Cong Ling Pain in Kuching for two months before she managed to escape and made it to the Indonesian consulate there, Abubakar said.
She was repatriated on Aug.21, to Entikong where she reported her case to the police.
Abubakar said that on Sept. 10, the Entikong Police arrested Nurdin, and three months later captured Kam Seng as he was trying to leave for Jakarta. Nurdin is now on trial while Kam Seng is awaiting trial.
He said the suspects faced up to 15 years in jail and fines of up to Rp 600 million ($53,400) for violating a laws on human trafficking and children protection.
“Two other suspects Eka, an Indonesian, and Helen, a Malaysian, are now both on police wanted lists,” Abubakar said.
Badrodin Haiti, the National Police’s director for security and transnational crime, told The Jakarta Globe that Kam Seng has admitted that he had sold 104 women to Helen.
“Those numbers are hard to track down. Kam Seng said that the women were taken to plantation projects as commercial sex workers,” Badrodin said, adding that police have so far had difficulties in finding those women.
Badrodin is currently in Malaysia, along with National Police Chief, Bambang Hendarso Danuri, and Chief Detective, Susno Duadji, to meet with their counterparts from Malaysian and Brunei Darrussalam to discuss cooperation in battling human trafficking and illegal logging.
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