Police in Peru have rescued 44 people captured by a Taiwanese criminal organization that used them in an extortion scheme in the South American country, officials in Lima said on Monday.
The foreigners were forced to call companies in Malaysia and Taiwan to demand money while posing as police or justice officials, said Peruvian General Carlos Malaver, the head of the police’s people smuggling investigation unit.
Of the people rescued in an operation carried out in a Lima suburb over the weekend, 43 were from Malaysia and one was from Taiwan, he said.
Photo AFP / handout / Peruvian Ministry of the Interior
They worked only at night and lived in cramped conditions, with only one meal a day, he said.
Six Taiwanese and two Peruvians were arrested.
The Malaysian Ministry of Foreign Affairs late on Monday confirmed in a statement that 43 citizens had been rescued, adding that its embassy staff in Lima had visited them all and “found them to be in good condition.”
“All the victims have also undergone an investigation process and will be repatriated to Malaysia in the near future,” the ministry said.
The captives had entered Peru last month, lured over social networks with promises of work in casinos in the capital. They told investigators they were taken to Amsterdam in the Netherlands and then to Peru.
Once there, members of a Taiwanese crime group known as Red Dragon took away their passports and cut them off from communication with relatives, police said.
A police operation was mounted after two women escaped and alerted the authorities.
Investigators seized more than US$10,000, dozens of cellphones and bank cards from the house where the foreigners were held.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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