NELSPRUIT – A Lowveld family helped an American woman who had allegedly been held captive for seven years after being trafficked into the country, escape her ordeal.
This drama unfolded on Wednesday when a man was driving in Springs and saw a woman being manhandled by an aggressive man.
The man who requested to only be identified as Leon, told Lowvelder: “I saw from his body language that he was threatening her so I drove around the block. When I came around again and stopped, he ran away and I asked her if everything was alright.” He said the woman was extremely attractive, with long dark wavy hair and blue eyes. “She was crying and I said to myself this girl doesn’t look South African.” The woman then just emotionally poured out to him saying, “Please, phone my mother, tell her I’m not dead, I am still alive”.
She then told Leon that she was American and her name was Ms Anna Kreller (26). She told him she had been lured to South Africa under false pretences and didn’t know where she was, as it was the first time she had managed to escape her circumstances.
Leon added that Kreller explained to him that seve years ago she had met a man from Cape Town over the Internet who tricked her into believing he wanted to marry her. The man travelled to America to fetch her and took her back with him to the Mother City.
The young woman also told Leon that when she got to Cape Town, the man immediately took her passport and assaulted her severely, breaking her nose in the process. She showed him the scars of old stab wounds on her body.She said he had then forced her into a life of prostitution and she was given to other people who had held her captive in a house in Geduld in Springs. Keller added they had tried to force her to take drugs over the years. Although she didn’t take drugs, she got addicted to alcohol.”
Leon asked her why she had never had gone for help before and she told him she had once gone to a police station to ask for help, but they had refused to help her as she had no passport or identity document.
“She cried about her two sons, whom I assume she had with the man who brought her to South Africa. However, she was so emotional, I couldn’t get the full story of what had happened from her.”
Leon then phoned his sister, Ms Daniella Visser in Nelspruit and asked her to phone Keller’s mother on the number she supplied. Visser got hold of Ms Angela Kreller in London. “She broke down crying over the phone as she didn’t know her daughter was still alive”. She also told Visser: “I didn’t like him when he came to the Sates. I felt uneasy about him, but my daughter refused to listen.”
A Sgt Benade came to the scene. “When the police arrived, an older woman who looked very unkempt told the police Kreller was her daughter. Anna turned round and screamed and the police put her in the car and drove off.”
He said Benade then phoned him later to say they had taken Anna to a place of safety.
Gauteng provincial police spokesman, Brig Neville Malila, said they were aware of the woman being taken to the Springs’ police station, but still had to decided whether or not to open a case.
According to the International Organisation for Migration, out of a reported four million people who are trafficked annually both within and outside their country, 80 per cent are women and girls and 50 per cent children. Over 90 per cent of trafficked persons are sexually exploited. Freedom Climb, a project that works with trafficked people around the globe, estimates that at least 30 000 children are prostituted through human trafficking annually in South Africa and 50 per cent of them are under the age of 14.
Human trafficking, described as “modern-day slavery”, is the recruitment and transportation of people from one place to another or one country to another, through the use of deception or force for the sole purpose of exploitation. Factors that make one vulnerable to human trafficking include poverty, lack of economic opportunities, unemployment, domestic violence, civil unrest, lack of access to education and low levels of human trafficking awareness. These factors provide human traffickers with a pool of susceptible people who easily fall for empty promises of a better life, according to the International Organisation for Migration.
Last year the national government committed itself to fighting human trafficking after the president Mr Jacob Zuma signed the new Prevention and Combating of Trafficking in Persons Bill. The Bill provides a single statute to tackle human trafficking holistically and comprehensively. This new legislation creates an offence of trafficking in persons as well as specific offences such as debt bondage, possessing and destroying or tempering with travel documents. It also provides a maximum penalty of R100 million or life imprisonment or both in the case of a conviction.
Furthermore, the legislation also caters for the victims, making it law to provide them with protection and assistance to overcome their traumatic experiences.
