Indonesian police have arrested 13 people after shocking images of alleged abuse against small children at a daycare center went viral, sparking outrage across the nation, officials said on Monday.
Police on Friday last week raided Little Aresha, a daycare center in Yogyakarta on Java island, following a report from a former employee.
CCTV footage circulating on social media showed children, most younger than two, lying on the floor wearing only diapers, their hands and feet bound with rags. The police have confirmed that the footage is authentic.
Photo: AFP
Police said they also found 20 children crammed into a room just 3m by 3m.
“So far, 13 people have been named suspects” and arrested in the case, Yogyakarta Police Chief Eva Guna Pandia told reporters on Monday.
Those in custody include 11 carers, as well as the headmaster and the head of the foundation that ran the center.
They face a rash of charges including child neglect. Other charges could be added as the investigation unfolds.
Pandia said the suspects told police they had tied up some of the children to prevent them disturbing others.
They claimed the center was understaffed, with not enough personnel to bathe and dress the children, Yogyakarta detective Riski Adrian said.
The daycare center accommodated about 100 children, more than half of whom are believed to have been maltreated, police said.
Parent Noorman Windarto said that he was shocked when he received a telephone call from a fellow parent on Friday last week, urging him to pick up his two-year-old son.
He later learnt from police that the boy, who had been attending the center since he was three months old, was among those to have been tied up.
“My heart was shattered,” the 42-year-old civil servant said. “My wife cried. Most of them [caregivers] were women, and their body language was so tender, so soft-spoken, and appeared to be religious.”
Noorman paid about 1.1 million rupiah (US$64) — half the minimum wage in Yogyakarta — for each of his two children to attend the center, since shuttered.
His oldest child, a daughter now aged six, stopped going recently.
She sometimes came home with bruises which the daycare center said she must have gotten elsewhere, playing, Noorman said.
His son had been repeatedly hospitalized with pneumonia, which the father now suspects might have had something to do with him being made to sleep on a cold floor without clothes.
“I am very angry, furious,” Noorman said. “They must be punished as severely as possible.”
Under Indonesia’s child protection law, the suspects face up to five years in prison and a 100 million rupiah fine.
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