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| Kevin Hyland, head of the Metropolitan Police's human trafficking unit speaks to the media outside New Scotland Yard's headquarters in London in this image taken from TV Thursday Nov. 21, 2013. London police say three women were held for at least 30 years against their will in a south London home. Metropolitan Police revealed Thursday the women had been rescued and announced the arrests of two people as part of an investigation into slavery and domestic servitude. |
LONDON (AP)
-- Three women have been freed after spending 30 years held captive in a
south London home, including one woman believed to have spent her
entire life in domestic slavery, police announced Thursday.
London's
Metropolitan Police spoke about the rescues after two people - a man
and a woman, both 67 - were arrested early Thursday on suspicion of
forced labor and domestic servitude.
The
arrests came as part of a slavery investigation launched after one of
the women contacted a charity in October to say she was being held
against her will along with two others. The charity went to the police,
the force said.
Those freed on Oct. 25 are a
69-year-old Malaysian woman, a 57-year-old Irish woman and a 30-year-old
British woman, police said.
Kevin Hyland,
head of the Metropolitan Police's human trafficking unit, said the women
are "highly traumatized" having had "no real exposure to the outside
world" for the past 30 years.
"Trying to find out exactly what has happened over three decades will understandably take some time," he said.
Police
initially said they did not believe any of the victims were related.
Later, however, they appeared to backtrack, saying the relationship
between the three women is part of the investigation and they will not
speculate on it.
The force also said there is
no evidence to suggest anything of a sexual nature - but cautioned that
the investigation is still not finished. Police would not speculate on
any motivation, name the suspects' nationalities or say if the suspects
were a couple.
The revelations raised numerous
questions - all still unanswered - about how the women's ordeal began
and why it endured for so long. What brought them to London? What
freedoms - if any - did they have? What restrictions and conditions were
they subject to? Did neighbors ever see them, or did they ever try to
escape?
The women - whose names have not been
released - are now safe at an undisclosed location in Britain and have
been working with severe trauma experts since their rescue, Hyland said.
It
is not known how the women ended up in the house. The 30-year-old, who
would have had to either been born in the home or enter it as an infant
given the police timeline, appears to have been held in domestic
servitude for her entire life, police said.
The
Irish woman called the charity from what appears to be an "ordinary
house in an ordinary street," said Aneeta Prem, founder of the charity
that promotes awareness of child abuse, forced marriages and honor
killings.
Police said the woman "found the
courage to call" in October after seeing a documentary on the BBC about
forced marriages. What followed were secret, "in-depth" conversations
with the women, Prem told Sky News.
"It had to
be pre-arranged when they were able to make calls to us and it had to
be done very secretly, because they felt they were in massive danger,"
she said.
Her charity first sounded the alarm
to Metropolitan Police's sexual offenses exploitation and child abuse
unit; the case then was passed on to its human trafficking unit.
By
tracking where the woman's calls were coming from, London police
managed to find the house in the borough of Lambeth, south of the River
Thames. London police were keeping the exact location of the house
secret.
After repeated, tentative calls to the
charity, two of the captive women agreed to meet at another location on
Oct. 25, police said. The first two - the British woman and the Irish
woman - walked out under their own power and identified the house where
they'd been held. At that point, police said they went in and rescued
the 69-year-old Malaysian woman.
Hyland said
there was a delay in arresting the two suspects - neither of whom are
British - as police worked to establish the facts of the case and to
ensure that the women who had escaped were not further traumatized. The
suspects are now in custody at a south London police station.
"When we had established the facts, we conducted the arrests," Hyland told reporters.
Hyland
said while the women had some "controlled freedom," police were still
working to establish what sort of conditions they lived under for the
past 30 years.
"For much of it, they would have been kept on the premises," Hyland said.
He
said his unit, which deals with many cases of servitude and forced
labor, had seen previous cases of people held for up to ten years.
"But we've never seen anything of this magnitude before," he said.
