Gunmen hold rescued 'massage girls' hostage

PHNOM PENH - Cambodian police are investigating a raid on a US-funded women's shelter in which gunmen abducted 93 women and young girls a day after police had rescued them from a brothel, officials said on Saturday.

Washington has demanded a full probe into the incident which began on Tuesday when the victims were rescued from the Chhay Hour 2 hotel, a reputed brothel in the capital Phnom Penh, and taken to the shelter.

A day later 30 armed gunmen abducted the group in a raid on the shelter, which has closed temporarily after its employees were threatened by the intruders.

Police said they did not know who had stormed the shelter and no arrests had been made.

"We cannot ignore this and we need further investigation," General Heng Peov, Phnom Penh's police chief, told Reuters.

About 50 of the women had shown up at the US embassy in Phnom Penh early on Saturday to say they were not prostitutes but worked at the hotel as bar or massage girls, Heng Peov said.

He said the group, aged 18 to 28, had either returned to work at the hotel or had gone home.

"They were not sex workers. They just worked as massage or karaoke girls," said Heng Peov.

Embassy officials were unavailable for comment, but in Washington a top US diplomat in charge of combating human trafficking demanded a full investigation.

"What the government of Cambodia has to do is arrest the traffickers, free the victims and stand behind the police chief who made the raid," said John Miller, director of the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.

Cambodia's Anti-Human Trafficking and Juvenile Protection Department, headed by General Un Sokunthea, had rescued the women and children and arrested operators of the brothel hotel on Dec. 7, the State Department said in a statement.

The statement said eight brothel operators were reportedly released a day later and went back armed to seize the victims from a shelter run by the NGO Agir pour les Femmes En Situation Precaire -- Acting for Women in Distressing Situations (AFESIP).

The group receives US funding, but it has closed its doors after its workers received death threats.

"If they could storm into our office, they could also kill us," said AFESIP president Mam Somaly.

"We have closed our office until the government brings the perpetrators to justice. If they fail to do so we will shut our office forever," she added.

She said many of the girls were under 18, the age of consent in Cambodia, and might have been pressured to say they were not involved in prostitution.

"We did our job and leave it to the government to handle it".

Cambodia emerged in the early 1990s from decades of war and the death of an estimated 1.7 million people under Pol Pot's 1975-79 "Killing Fields" regime.

But the country remains one of the world's poorest. Cambodia and neighbouring Southeast Asian states such as Myanmar and Thailand are considered sources and transit routes for women and children trafficked for sex.

Miller said the incident was a disappointing setback because Cambodia had made some headway in fighting trafficking in people in recent years.

- REUTERS