Lankan illegals
nabbed in Indonesia
More than 100 illegal immigrants from Sri Lanka
have been arrested in Indonesia in the latest crackdown on human
trafficking, a report from Indonesia said. An AFP report said 107
Sri Lankan men were detained when immigration officials raided two
houses Thursday in the resort town of Cisarua, according to Muhammad
Indra, a director with Indonesia's immigration department.
He said all the men had entered Indonesia last
month on ‘business visas that were improperly obtained’
through gangsters in Colombo and Jakarta.
“We believe they were brought in by a human
trafficking syndicate which targets Indonesia as either a transit
country or a final destination. We are going to get to the bottom
of this,” Indra told AFP. He described all the men as ‘jobless
individuals’ who have no clear purpose to visit Indonesia.
He also said police and immigration officials were searching for
43 other men who were not at the houses during the raids. S. Pirabakaran,
one of the illegal immigrants, was quoted by the daily Kompas newspaper
as saying that he had obtained his visa ‘legally’ from
the Indonesian embassy in Colombo.
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