November 21, 2013 -- Updated 1925 GMT (0325 HKT)
British police have arrested a couple on suspicion of holding three
women captive for more than 30 years, Scotland Yard announced Thursday. FULL STORY
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UK police arrest couple suspected of holding three women captive for 30 years
November 21, 2013 -- Updated 2035 GMT (0435 HKT)
Women rescued from 'decades of slavery'
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Women were freed in October through the efforts of Freedom Charity, police say
- London police say they have arrested a couple on suspicion of holding three women captive
- The arrests came after a woman told a charity she had been held against her will for 30 years
- Police say the accused man and woman, both 67, are in custody
Officers from the Human
Trafficking Unit arrested the man and woman, both 67, at their Lambeth,
south London home early Thursday as part of an investigation into
slavery and domestic servitude, the Metropolitan Police said. They are
in custody.
The "highly traumatized"
victims -- a 69-year-old Malaysian woman, 57-year-old Irish woman and
30-year-old Briton -- have been taken to a place of safety and are being
cared for by a charity, the Metropolitan Police said.
Police said they'd been
alerted in October to the situation by Freedom Charity, which got a
phone call from a woman saying "she had been held against her will in a
house in London for more than 30 years."
Police: Women held captive for 3 decades
Women held captive in a London home
Why slavery still exists today
"We have launched an
extensive investigation to establish the facts surrounding these very
serious allegations," Detective Inspector Kevin Hyland said.
"We've established that
all three women were held in this situation for at least 30 years. They
did have some controlled freedom."
Hyland praised the actions of Freedom Charity and said police were working with the organization to support the victims.
"They are extremely
traumatized, which explains the discrepancy between when the Freedom
Charity were contacted and the arrests were made," he said. "It would be
wrong of us to move at a pace that would further traumatize any
victims."
Hyland said police were
unsure where the youngest victim had been born, "but she appears to have
been in servitude for her entire life."
Police had seen no
evidence of sexual abuse, he said. "We're very early in the
investigation, we're not investigating offenses of a sexual nature,
there haven't been any arrests of a sexual nature, so that's the
circumstances at the moment."
Hyland said it was an
unprecedented case for the Met's Human Trafficking Unit. "We've seen
some cases where people have been held for up to 10 years, but we've
never seen anything of this magnitude before."
News of the couple's arrest first spread on Twitter.
A television documentary
on forced marriages relating to the work of Freedom Charity prompted
one of the victims to call for help.
Freedom Charity
spokeswoman Aneeta Prem said the organization had taken "immediate
action" to plan a rescue after learning of the women's situation.
"Facilitating their
escape was achieved using utmost sensitivity and secrecy and with the
safety of the women as our primary concern," she said, describing the
work of those involved as "outstanding."
CNN's Max Foster said
police had told him that the women had been released in October after
sensitive negotiations by the charity.
The charity had worked to gain their trust and coax them out of the house, communicating through prearranged phone calls.
"Over time they built up
that trust, the police gathered outside the house and then they had the
confidence to leave the house," Foster said. "It seems to have taken
place in a suburban area of south London, in an ordinary street."
UK Special Envoy for
Human Trafficking Anthony Steen told CNN he was unsurprised by the case
as there were likely to be many cases of domestic slavery in the
country.
"We don't know the number but we know it's pretty huge. Domestics are hidden away," he said.
"The difference between
slavery when it was manifest in America -- as it was in England -- was
that you could see it everywhere," Steen said. "Since then having
abolished it, it's grown, it's got bigger and bigger -- in fact they say
it's between 10 and 20 times the size it was in the 1800s."
Steen said the largest
number of people involved in slavery in Britain were in brothels, and
that group was followed by men held against their will in debt bondage.
CNN's Max Foster in London contributed to this report.
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