A group of Greek migrant workers has fled Britain under a police escort after accusing their bosses of beating them and denying them wages, a British newspaper reported yesterday.
The 44 men and 10 women, all ethnic Romany from northern Greece, were housed in tents and an unheated shed while they worked picking flowers in Cornwall, southwestern England, according to The Independent.
They claimed they were not paid for weeks, were given a slice of bread and a tin of dogfood to eat at meal times, and were threatened when they complained and said they wanted to return home.
The plight of the workers, who the Independent said were in Britain legally, emerged a week after 19 presumed Chinese immigrants drowned while collecting shellfish on the northwestern coast of England.
Since that tragedy in the seaside resort of Morecambe, police have been investigating whether the Chinese were being used for cheap labor by "gangmasters." The case prompted calls for a clampdown on the exploitation of immigrant workers.
The Independent said the 54 Greek Romanies returned home on Wednesday, helped by the Greek embassy in London, a Romany rights organization in Greece and a Greek Orthodox priest in Cornwall.
One of the workers, Stelios Saris, told the British daily: "We [the men] were given a tent to sleep in with all of us crammed inside, while the women slept on the floor of a nearby shed. It was freezing cold and there was no heating or plumbing."
Another of the workers, Chrisovalandou Mandela, 19, said that after a 10-hour shift in the freezing midwinter mud and rain she would trudge back to an unheated shed where she and the other women were forced to live.
She claimed her group was beaten, starved and denied wages before they were allowed home.
Thomas Dalipis, who was also among the group, told the Independent: "We'd come back to that shed where we were sleeping and get dog food cans for dinner, not even one per person. Ten people had to share one cigarette."
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS