Jakarta. A former top Indonesian official in charge of migrant worker protection has demanded an investigation into the police chief of East Nusa Tenggara province, or NTT, over indications of police complicity in the alleged trafficking of migrant workers, both within the country and abroad.
“I suspect that there’s a senior official masterminding the human trafficking racket in NTT,” Jumhur Hidayat, the former chairman of the Agency for the Placement and Protection of Indonesian Migrant Workers, or BNP2TKI, told the Jakarta Globe in Jakarta late on Sunday.
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The case, under investigation since the beginning of the year, centered on the discovery of 52 people, mostly women, being held in squalid conditions at a migrant worker placement agency in Kupang, the provincial capital. Investigators later determined that 26 of them were victims of human trafficking and were destined for indentured labor elsewhere in Indonesia and abroad.
Rudy said police had already named representatives of the placement agency as suspects in the case, when the order came earlier this month from Sr. Comr. Mochammad Slamet, the director of special crimes at the provincial police, to drop the case for no specified reason.