The Criminal Police Department of Vietnam's Ministry of Public Security, together with colleagues from Hanoi, has shut down the activities of a criminal group engaged in human trafficking. The network operated in the capital as well as in the cities of Haiphong, Lao Cai and other regions of the country. Police officers freed 34 people, 12 of whom were children under 16.
Among the victims were residents of Hanoi. One of them was a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl from the capital's outskirts. Her parents are divorced, and the girl was living with her father. A new acquaintance from a social network suggested she drop out of school and go to work at a snack bar to earn money. Instead, she was sold to a karaoke bar for seven million dong. She was then resold three more times, and with each sale her debt to the owners grew to tens of millions of dong.
I thought about death, because there was too much humiliation there, you work like an ox. We were scolded, shouted at, sometimes beaten. The doors were locked around the clock, cameras watched us 24 hours a day. Often I felt like an animal rather than a human being.
— victim, 14 years old
Another victim, a girl of the same age from the Yao ethnic group living in the border province of Cao Bang, also wanted to help her poor family and believed a person she had met online. Like the others, she was sold from one karaoke bar to another. According to the girl, some of the captives were kept in a locked room. She said that several young women tried to escape by jumping from the fifth floor, but they were caught and sold on to the next establishment.
What all the rescued people had in common was that they received no money for their work; on the contrary, the owners of the establishments recorded debts against them. In one such place on the outskirts of Hanoi, the girls were held on the fifth floor of a five-story building adjoining a karaoke bar. All the rooms were locked.
Major Ngo Duc Minh, a representative of the Criminal Police Department, told journalists that the organizer of the criminal scheme was simultaneously the owner and manager of karaoke bars in Hanoi. Several premises where the workers were held were located around the establishments. According to the major, the group was well organized and its activities seriously affected public order.
Because of what they endured, all the victims require several days of psychological rehabilitation, which they are undergoing at the "House of Peace" center in Hanoi. Police have already taken them home to their relatives. The Hanoi Police Investigation Department has opened a criminal case under the article on trafficking in persons under 16. Charges have been brought against eight suspects.
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