The Hindu : Kerala News : Indian woman found abandoned in Dubai

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Feb 23, 2005

Kerala

Kerala

Indian woman found abandoned in Dubai

DUBAI, FEB. 22. An Indian woman found wandering in the streets of Dubai has claimed that she was forced into prostitution and given pills that caused her to go blind. She was abandoned by her captors because her disability meant that she was no longer of any use to them, the 33-year-old woman, now at an immigration jail in Sharjah, told the Gulf News.

``I have been forced to live a cruel life for the past year,'' the unidentified woman told the paper from the jail. ``I do not know whom to blame, the people who brought me here, poverty or fate. I was given pills by my captors. They told me I should take one a day as they would keep me strong but they affected my eyes,'' she said. The Indian Consulate has been notified and an investigation is under way. A Sharjah-based Indian organisation is also trying to help the woman.

According to immigration sources in Sharjah, the woman was found wandering around the Dubai Naturalisation and Residency Department on Wednesday last. ``We brought her here from the immigration jail in Dubai. From her labour card, we found out she is on a Sharjah visa, so she has been transferred to Sharjah's immigration jail,'' the sources said.

The woman told the paper that she came here a year ago to work as a babysitter through a recruitment agency in Thiruvananthapuram. "Some people came to meet me at the airport. I was informed I would be working with a family in Sharjah. I was trapped and forced into doing illegal activities. I was locked up and subjected to physical torture that is too painful to talk about,'' she said. - PTI

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