Posted on 12/06/2013 1:54:37 PM PST by Brad from Tennessee
Up to 30,000 Eritreans have been abducted since 2007 and taken to Egypt's Sinai to suffer torture and ransom demands, new research says.
The study, presented to the European parliament, says Eritrean and Sudanese security officers are colluding with the kidnap gangs.
At least $600m (£366m) has been extorted from families in ransom payments, it says.
Victims are kidnapped in Ethiopia, Sudan and Eritrea and taken to Sinai.
Eritrea has denied its officials are involved in the kidnappings.
Most of those targeted are Eritrean refugees fleeing the country, says the report - The Human Trafficking Cycle: Sinai and Beyond.
"Their captors are opportunistic criminals looking to profit from their vulnerability," the report says.
"[The victims] are then taken to the Sinai and sold, sometimes more than once, to Bedouin groups living in the Sinai."
The report was authored by Meron Estefanos, an Eritrean human rights activist in Sweden, and Prof Mirjam van Reisen and Dr Conny Rijken of Tilburg University in the Netherlands.
The report says Eritrea's Border Surveillance Unit (BSU) and Sudanese security officials are among the "actors" colluding with the gangs that hold people hostage in the the largely lawless Sinai.
"[The hostages] are chained together without toilets or washing facilities and dehydrated, starved and deprived of sleep," the report says. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
“At least $600m (£366m) has been extorted from families in ransom payments, it says. “
Seriously, I didn’t think there was that much money in all of Eritrea.
Who pays the ransom? I seem to remember reading they make a dollar a day there.
Maybe if they abducted 30,000 at a time it would get news coverage in the US?
not at one time maybe
Oh, those rascally Muslims!
It sounds as if Egypt exerts much less control over the Sinai than the Israelis did when they took it over following the 1972 (or was it 1973) Yom Kippur war.
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