Criminals treat immigrants as easy targets

By Tony Wall

Police and ethnic leaders are concerned that criminals are targeting immigrants for burglaries and home invasions because they keep money and valuables in their homes.

Two immigrants have been attacked in their Auckland homes in the past week by masked men armed with knives.

Kuwaiti political refugee Sghayer Mahdi was bludgeoned with a wheel brace by two men demanding cash at his Onehunga home, and $50,000 worth of gold jewellery was stolen by two men who bound and gagged an Indian woman in her Papatoetoe home on Saturday.

Police say that while robberies and extortion of Chinese families, prevalent a couple of years ago, are declining, other immigrant groups are being targeted.

The immediate past president of the Federation of Ethnic Councils, Dr Nagalingam Rasalingam, said he had been alerted to a spate of robberies of Indian and Sri Lankan family homes across Auckland in the past three months.

He said that in incidents in Mt Roskill and Epsom, families had returned home after short trips away to find their houses ransacked.

Cases where the immigrants were home and were subjected to violence were a big concern, he said.

Dr Rasalingam said many immigrants kept valuable jewellery at home because it was needed for a variety of functions.

He said the Hindu custom, for example, was for wives always to wear necklaces given to them by their husbands.

"If a woman goes to a wedding, for example, and she is not wearing her necklace she feels other people will look and say something has happened to her marriage."

He said it would be obvious to criminals casing such functions who was wearing large quantities of expensive jewellery.

"Most of the criminals know that recently arrived migrants will have that type of jewellery in their house and they can be easy targets."

He said it was time to start educating new arrivals on the dangers of keeping valuables at home and steps they could take such as installing alarms and keeping their valuables in banks and safe deposit boxes.

The officer investigating the attack on the Indian woman, Detective Sergeant Neil Grimstone of Otahuhu CIB, said he did not believe home invaders selected homes at random.

"I'd say they spend some time in picking their targets."

He said it was difficult for immigrants if they hid valuables.

"If you've got it hidden well then they [the robbers] are not going to get anything but perhaps that leaves you open to them coming back and giving you a damn good thumping to extract it out of you."