Sunday Times 2
Indian woman forced into slavery in Britian
An Indian woman was forced into modern-day slavery by two women who locked her indoors and forced her to work 16-hour days.
The victim was also raped by the women’s accomplice, 54-year-old butcher Enkarta Balapovi.
At a sentencing of three people, the court heard he subjected the 39-year-old to four months of sexual abuse behind his wife’s back while forcing his victim to sleep on the floor of his single room flat.
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| Convicted: Shamina Yousuf (left) and
Shashi Obhrai (right) treated the woman like a ‘slave’ |
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He forced the woman to cook and clean for him, and threatened to burn her passport unless she stripped naked and performed sex acts.
When the married victim resisted his advances, Balapovi threatened to throw her on to the streets without any identity documents if she did not sleep with him.
The illiterate woman had been lured to the UK with the promise of work as a nanny, hoping to earn money for her poverty-stricken family in India.
But she found herself locked indoors and forced to work 16-hour days during a four-year ordeal at the hands of Balapovi and co-accused women Shamina Yousuf, a secretary, and optician Shashi Obhrai.
The mother-of-four was burned with an iron, threatened with hypodermic needles and had a knife held to her throat by Obhrai, 54, when she tried to escape.
Her passport was seized by Yousuf, 33, as soon as she arrived, and the woman was passed between three families as a ‘dogsbody’, earning just £2,300 for year’s of gruelling work.
Despite dubbing Obhrai as ‘wicked’, Judge Shani Barnes spared her a jail sentence because she is the primary carer for her terminally ill millionaire husband Balram Obhrai, 59.
Mr Obhrai had been accused of trafficking and making threats to kill but the prosecution offered no evidence against him because he has a brain tumour and is on his death bed at home. Yousuf, 33, had first recruited the woman when she came to the UK in 2005 to earn money for her poverty-stricken family in Hyderabad, India.
After nearly three years as a ‘servant’ for Yousuf’s family and friends, the woman confronted her.
Yousuf, whose marriage was breaking up, threw a mug at the woman’s foot which left a two-inch gash.
Obhrai employed the victim from October 2007 and forced her to work from 6am to 11pm.
During her time there, she was burned with an iron, threatened with a hypodermic needle and hit over the head with a rolling pin after a row about chapatti recipes.
Balapovi was jailed for 11 years, while Yousuf was sentenced to 40 hours community service and Obhrai was given a 20 month suspended jail sentence.
Prosecutor Caroline Haughey said the uneducated victim was ‘one of the most vulnerable members of society’ who had been targeted because she was unaware of her basic human rights.
‘She has been bullied physically, psychologically, she has been sexually assaulted, she has been raped,’ she said.
‘She was clearly viewed as a belonging by the defendants in this case, each one of them separately contributing to the violation of her right.
‘Her naivety, her innocence, her lack of education, has been exploited with threats and physical violence preying on her lack of understanding of western norms.’
In a statement to the court, the victim, who has been given compassionate leave to stay in the UK for five years, said: ‘They have made my life hell. I have suffered with depression and sleepless nights for a very long time.
‘I have to take medication so that I can get some sleep. They have treated me so badly that I worry at night that they will come for me.
‘These people are dangerous they have ruined my life and kept me away from my children. Each should be punished for their wrongdoings.’
During a six-week trial, the court heard how Yousuf had forced the woman into servitude at her home in London by taking away her passport and promising to help her get a UK visa.
But she refused to return the passport and the victim found herself trapped for three years before she was passed on to Balapovi, a butcher living in north London.
He downed alcohol and repeatedly forced himself on her when she spurned his advances, grabbing her hair, kissing her so violently he cut her lips, and promising her a visa for her if she had sex with him.
The woman said: ‘When Salim [Balapovi] used to have sex with me, my whole body used to ache. I can’t move on – he raped me.’
When passed to Obhrai’s house in also in north London the woman was beaten with high heel shoes, jabbed in the head with a comb and pushed her down the stairs.
Of one incident, the woman said: ‘Shashi Obhrai put a hot iron on my arm when I asked her for my earnings to be paid.
‘She told me that she would do it. I told her that the iron was on and she said, “Have a look, is it hot or not?”, and put the iron on me.’
She was also forced to survive on out-of-date food and the spat-out leftovers of Obhrai’s children. When she was sick from tiredness, Obhrai made her clean up the vomit with her own clothes.
The woman managed to escapefrom Obhrai’s clutches to a crisis centre, but her tormentor found her and threatened to kill her with a knife if she did not return.
She eventually escaped again and contacted refuge charities and the police
© Daily Mail, London
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