Corrupt Maltese police arrest Chinese slave-trade victim and whistleblower and have him thrown in prison

You know you are living in a corrupt hell when a vulnerable victim on the edge of despair goes public with the story of how he was enslaved by traffickers and left helpless and trapped on the other side of the world from China, and the Maltese police, instead of calling him in for more information to initiate an investigation into how he was trafficked, and by whom, arrest him instead and have him thrown into prison.

I hope the human rights groups fight this man’s case, put pressure on the authorities, and don’t allow him to be forgotten in prison. If they don’t, they really are there for nothing.

Xiao Guan, 29, blew the whistle to Leonard Callus and Caroline Muscat of The Sunday Times on how he was trafficked in to Malta and then made to work as a slave in a Chinese restaurant kitchen. He was quartered in a slum and asked for money he didn’t have – because he wasn’t paid wages but only given just about enough money for a bit of food – to use the cooker in the squalid flat. He had no choice but to cobble together a makeshift grill and cook over a tiny fire on the roof.

The day The Sunday Times published its large and shocking report, two Chinese minders went to the police, saying that they had just gone to the flat to turn Guan out onto the streets, but he tried to attack them with a knife.

And our corrupt police, instead of linking these men’s report to the massive story staring up at them from the pages of the Sunday newspaper, went over to arrest Guan and found no knife. But still they arrested him and arraigned him, asking the court to deny him bail because he could escape. The court ordered that he be held on remand.

How could he escape? The man was desperate, with no money even for food. That is exactly why he went to the newspaper and blew the whistle. And then he was framed by the very same Chinese traffickers whose victim he is, who reported him for “attacking them” precisely because they want him out of the way and silenced.

And the police and the courts cooperated, applying the letter of the law and completely flouting its spirit.

Meanwhile, there is no word from the authorities about Guan’s very real accusations of Chinese slave-trafficking in Malta. Those accusations have fallen into a vacuum.