British police raided a travelers’ site on Sunday to rescue 24 men they said had been held as slaves and forced to live in squalor, some for up to 15 years.
More than 200 officers from Bedfordshire Police entered the Green Acres caravan site in Leighton Buzzard, northwest of London, and arrested four men and one woman, all residents on the site, on suspicion of slavery offenses.
Police said the freed men were mostly English, with some of eastern European origin. Detectives said they were all vulnerable — either homeless or alcoholics — and had been recruited by “gangmasters” offering money, the BBC reported.
The Bedfordshire police force had conducted a long-running investigation into suggestions that the men were being held against their will in poor conditions and forced to work for no pay.
SHOCKING
“The men we found at the site were in a poor state of physical health and the conditions they were living in were shockingly filthy and cramped,” said Detective Chief Inspector Sean O’Neil, from the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire major crime unit.
“We believe that some of them had been living and working there in a state of virtual slavery, some for just a few weeks and others for up to 15 years,” O’Neil said.
“They’re recruited and told if you come here we’ll pay you £80 [US$126.62] a day, we’ll look after you, give you board and lodgings,” he added.
“But when they get here, their hair is cut off them, they’re kept in in some cases [in] horseboxes, dog kennels and old caravans, made to work for no money, given very, very small amounts of food. That’s the worse case,” O’Neil said.
BETTER TREATMENT
“Some are treated a little bit better, but they were told they could not leave, and if they did, they would be beaten up and attacked,” O’Neil said.
“But in fact some people did leave and told us what was going on and when we looked back since 2008, we were aware of 28 people who had made similar accusations,” O’Neil said.
The rescued men have been taken to a medical center.
“Some of these people have come off covered in excrement and dirty clothing because that was all they were allowed to live in,” O’Neil told BBC TV.
“After being cared for, given food and fresh clothing, we hope to then interview them. That in itself will take a long time because these people are institutionalized. One person we know has been here 15 years — so to him this is normal life,” O’Neil said.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the