By JOHN ANDREWS
An Auckland woman has been rescued from South America, where she says she lived on the streets as a savage after escaping from a dungeon cell.
The 32-year-old says she was abducted from the Auckland waterfront as a teenager about 15 years ago and taken on a ship
to Ecuador.
Moapi "Sabrina" Tukufenoga returned to Auckland last month with the help of family, friends, and Foreign Minister Phil Goff, who compared her plight to modern slavery.
After landing in Ecuador, she says she was held captive for months, chained in a cell alongside dozens of other girls who were forced into the sex trade.
She eventually escaped and was found homeless and mentally wrecked by a health worker the Weekend Herald spoke to in Guayaquil, 280km from Ecuador's capital, Quito.
Sabrina took nearly 15 years to make contact with her family again.
"After I escaped, I did not know I was in Ecuador," she said. "People thought I was crazy. I had lost my mind. [I felt] like I was the only person in the world."
Sabrina has told the Weekend Herald in a series of interviews over the past month that she accepted a sailor's invitation to go on board a ship for a party in mid-1987 when she was 18.
She says she does not remember what happened, but she insists she never intended leaving the country.
In Ecuador, Sabrina says, she was held in a small, dark basement room.
"I heard young girls screaming out, calling for their mummies and daddies. They used to put injections into my arms. They did it when I was angry, if I did not behave.
"I think they took [the other girls] away to do movies, I think sex movies."
Sabrina denies that she was ever forced on screen or into prostitution, although she breaks down when asked about what happened to her. She mentions that there are dark things she can't speak of.
After her escape, she lived on the streets, unable to follow the language at first, eventually accepting the charity of some locals, including a man who spoke to the Weekend Herald on condition of anonymity. He works in the health field and is known as "the Doctor".
"She was on the street at night because she didn't have a place to stay," said the Doctor, who first met Sabrina about 10 years ago.
"She couldn't talk about herself and her reaction was really aggressive. She was in a very emotional state."
Sabrina started to build a life for herself with the help of the Doctor, his wife, and other people who befriended her.
But the Doctor always knew she was lost.
"She had no flag [nationality]," he said. "We noticed she was a foreigner, then finally she told us how she had escaped and didn't have any documents."
With the support of the Doctor, Sabrina contacted her sister, Leslie, in Auckland last year, and began the process of trying to get home, a task made difficult by the fact that she was in Ecuador illegally, with no passport.
Mr Goff was contacted in June and asked to help.
"[New Zealand] is not represented in Ecuador so we worked through the British in Ecuador," said Mr Goff. "They helped with her departure and immigration formalities. It was all done very discreetly."
Mr Goff described Sabrina's story as very sad.
"Whether we will ever get to the bottom of who was responsible for her kidnapping, it's a little hard to know.
"I don't know if she was intoxicated or quite how she came to be on the Auckland waterfront - I haven't asked those questions and probably don't want to know.
"We [the Ministry of Foreign Affairs] just looked at it from a human point of view and said, 'Here's somebody in some trouble, under some threat, who needs to come home'."
Once they found out where she was, Sabrina's sister and brother-in-law spent more than $20,000 supporting her and getting her home.
Mr Goff said it was Government policy that families meet the costs of New Zealanders in trouble overseas. It would be a "slippery slope" if the Government started paying for people to come home.
While Sabrina's story sounded "absolutely bizarre", Mr Goff said it had to be looked at in an international context.
"If you look at other stories of people-trafficking, it is relatively common. Certainly the nature of what happens in some countries in the region, you would have to suspect that it was quite likely that that fate has befallen other people as well.
"It is the equivalent of a modern-day slave trade."
A United States State Department report on trafficking says more than 700,000 people were moved across international borders last year. Many were forced into the sex trade.
Sabrina finally returned to New Zealand on July 27. When she touched down at Auckland, she thought to herself: "I'm home, I'm home."
- additional reporting by Eugene Bingham
* andrewsj@ihug.co.nz
The Moapi Appeal
The Weekend Herald is offering to help raise money for Moapi Tukufenoga as she works to pull her life back together. Her sister spent thousands of dollars supporting her and arranging for her repatriation.
Donations should be sent to
The Moapi Appeal,
Editorial Department,
New Zealand Herald,
PO Box 706,
Auckland.
By JOHN ANDREWS
An Auckland woman has been rescued from South America, where she says she lived on the streets as a savage after escaping from a dungeon cell.
The 32-year-old says she was abducted from the Auckland waterfront as a teenager about 15 years ago and taken on a ship
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.