Indonesian police arrested nearly 500 people suspected of human trafficking in June, authorities in the Southeast Asian country said on Thursday as they try to crack down on the scourge.
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Law enforcement agencies have released 1,553 human trafficking victims in the past two weeks before they were transported out of the country, national police spokesman Ahmad Ramadhan said.
“In a short time we managed to save a large number of people, but others had already left Indonesia,” he said.
Between June 5 and June 18, police arrested 494 suspects, but five leaders of the network are still wanted, the official noted.
Indonesia is one of the most important source countries for migrants in Southeast Asia. Hundreds of thousands of people leave the archipelago every year, often illegally, to find better-paying jobs abroad.
Police set up a human trafficking unit in June to step up the fight against the exploitation of Indonesians abroad after several cases of serious abuse came to light.
The victims, many of whom were children, were freed before being sold as domestic help, crew members or prostitutes.
The United Nations estimates that between 100,000 and a million people are “sold” into forced labor or prostitution in Indonesia every year.
Recently, new networks have been uncovered for exploiting victims who were forced to promote and sell cryptocurrency investments or other scams online to their compatriots.
Indonesian authorities have pledged to step up investigations and prosecutions of traffickers and to return trafficking victims to other countries in Southeast Asia.
Over the past year, Indonesia has repatriated several thousand of its Burmese and Cambodian compatriots who were forced to work in cyber-blackmail rings.
Human trafficking is also an internal problem in Indonesia, the region’s largest economy.
At least 57 people were found in cages on a palm oil plantation in North Sumatra last year.
They were held under the pretext of participating in a drug rehabilitation program and forced to do forced labor on the farm.