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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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