Indonesia has deported five Saudi men for entering into short-term marriages with local women so they could have sex, a newspaper reported yesterday.
Seven Saudi men were arrested on Monday near the West Java resort town of Bogor, where short-term marriage contracts between Muslim tourists and local women, called kawin kontrak, are widespread, the Jakarta Post reported.
"This country forbids people from engaging in contractual marriages," Suharyanto, head of immigration in Bogor, was quoted as saying.
"Moreover, they have misused their tourist visas by getting married instead of just spending their time on vacation," he said.
The five Saudis were deported on Wednesday. Suharyanto, who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name, did not disclose the status of the remaining two arrested Saudis.
Kawin kontrak is a long-standing scam in Bogor through which Muslim tourists marry Muslim Indonesian women for as short as a few weeks so they can have sex.
Women's rights activists argue the practice is a form of legalized prostitution.
Bogor's police chief, Senior Commander Sukrawardi Dahlan, promised to crack down on the practice but acknowledged it would be an uphill battle.
"The business of marriage in that area has become a deep-rooted culture for the people there," he was quoted as saying.
The issue was highlighted recently when Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla, during a trip to the Middle East, said there were benefits from short-term marriages, including improved welfare for the brides' families and handsome children from the unions.
He later claimed his remarks were in jest.
TIT-FOR-TAT: The arrest of Filipinos that Manila said were in China as part of a scholarship program follows the Philippines’ detention of at least a dozen Chinese The Philippines yesterday expressed alarm over the arrest of three Filipinos in China on suspicion of espionage, saying they were ordinary citizens and the arrests could be retaliation for Manila’s crackdown against alleged Chinese spies. Chinese authorities arrested the Filipinos and accused them of working for the Philippine National Security Council to gather classified information on its military, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this week, citing state security officials. It said the three had confessed to the crime. The National Security Council disputed Beijing’s accusations, saying the three were former recipients of a government scholarship program created under an agreement between the
Sitting around a wrestling ring, churchgoers roared as local hero Billy O’Keeffe body-slammed a fighter named Disciple. Beneath stained-glass windows, they whooped and cheered as burly, tattooed wresters tumbled into the aisle during a six-man tag-team battle. This is Wrestling Church, which brings blood, sweat and tears — mostly sweat — to St Peter’s Anglican church in the northern England town of Shipley. It is the creation of Gareth Thompson, a charismatic 37-year-old who said he was saved by pro wrestling and Jesus — and wants others to have the same experience. The outsized characters and scripted morality battles of pro wrestling fit
ACCESS DISPUTE: The blast struck a house, and set cars and tractors alight, with the fires wrecking several other structures and cutting electricity An explosion killed at least five people, including a pregnant woman and a one-year-old, during a standoff between rival groups of gold miners early on Thursday in northwestern Bolivia, police said, a rare instance of a territorial dispute between the nation’s mining cooperatives turning fatal. The blast thundered through the Yani mining camp as two rival mining groups disputed access to the gold mine near the mountain town of Sorata, about 150km northwest of the country’s administrative capital of La Paz, said Colonel Gunther Agudo, a local police officer. Several gold deposits straddle the remote area. Agudo had initially reported six people killed,
SUSPICION: Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing returned to protests after attending a summit at which he promised to hold ‘free and fair’ elections, which critics derided as a sham The death toll from a major earthquake in Myanmar has risen to more than 3,300, state media said yesterday, as the UN aid chief made a renewed call for the world to help the disaster-struck nation. The quake on Friday last week flattened buildings and destroyed infrastructure across the country, resulting in 3,354 deaths and 4,508 people injured, with 220 others missing, new figures published by state media showed. More than one week after the disaster, many people in the country are still without shelter, either forced to sleep outdoors because their homes were destroyed or wary of further collapses. A UN estimate
RSS