‘HK maids lured by IS recruiters’

JAKARTA (AFP) — Indonesian maids working in Hong Kong are being radicalized by extremists from the Islamic State (IS) group, a security think-tank said in a report yesterday.

Around 150,000 of the city’s army of domestic helpers are from Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.

Against a backdrop of growing religious conservatism at home, a small number of militant maids has emerged, according to a report from the Jakartabased Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC).

But rights activists and the Indonesian Muslim community in Hong Kong said they were unaware of radicals and fear that reported links with IS would breed unfair suspicion.

The IPAC investigation described a “radical fringe” of around 45 Indonesian domestic helpers, who may have been attracted to militant circles by “the search for a sense of community in an unfamiliar environment.”

“Some of these women were drawn by jihadi boyfriends they met online,” says IPAC analyst Nava Nuraniyah. “But some joined IS as a path to empowerment.”

A string of abuse cases has highlighted the exploitation of maids in Hong Kong by unscrupulous employment agencies which confiscate their passports, claim their wages and keep them in the dark about their rights.