Charges of US maid held captive due to 'cultural confusion,' lawyer says

NEW YORK, April 13 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A Southern California couple accused of forcing an Indonesian woman to work as an unpaid live-in maid are victims of "cultural confusion," their attorney said on Wednesday.

The case against Firas Majeed and Shatha Abbas, who are originally from Iraq, stems from misunderstandings due to money and language differences among the immigrants, defense attorney Douglas Brown told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Majeed, 44, and Abbas, 38, were arrested this month on charges they forced their housekeeper to work up to 18 hours a day without pay in their San Diego-area apartment.

"All the people involved are poor, there are least three languages involved - Bahasa Indonesian, Arabic and English - and there are cultural differences among the parties," Brown said.

"So it's a confusing scenario for all of them," he said.

The housekeeper was removed from the couple's home by agents with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security after she slipped a hand-written note to a visiting nurse in March, according to court documents.

The note said she was being abused, and it asked for help, according to the documents.

Majeed and Abbas, who face federal charges of forced labor, trafficking and document servitude, entered pleas of not guilty last week in U.S. District Court in San Diego.

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Charges of US maid held captive due to 'cultural confusion,' lawyer says

SHAMLAPUR, BANGLADESH - JULY 4: A photograph of Rohingya trafficking victim Mohammad Aiaz is seen July 4, 2015 in Shamlapur, Bangladesh. On March 5, 2015 Aiaz met a man who promised to take him to a good job in Malaysia for free. He left Bangladesh with 13 other Rohingya. A few days after that his mother, Lila Begum, got a phone call from her son saying he was on the ship and that she needed to pay a man in Teknaf 200,000 taka ($2,570) or he would be killed. She managed to pay 175,000 but she has not heard from her son since. In the past months thousands of Rohingya have landed on the shores of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, many of them by way of Bangladesh. The Rohingya pay up to $2,000 to traffickers, and they sail out from Bangladesh's southern coastline on fishing boats to meet larger ships in the deep sea that will take them to Malaysia. UNHCR estimates that there are more than 300,000 Rohingya living in Bangladesh. (Photo by Shazia Rahman/Getty Images)

An armed Malaysian policeman checks a driver's documentations a day after the government announced the discovery of camps and graves, the first such sites found in Malaysia since a regional human-trafficking crisis erupted earlier this month, near Malaysia-Thailand borders in Wang Kelian on May 25, 2015. A total of 139 grave sites and 28 human-trafficking camps have been found in a remote northern Malaysian border region, the country's top police official told reporters. AFP PHOTO / MOHD RASFAN (Photo credit should read MOHD RASFAN/AFP/Getty Images)

A journalist takes photo of 24 alleged human traffickers' pictures displayed on a board, released by Italian police during a press conference in Palermo on April 20, 2015. AFP PHOTO / MARCELLO PATERNOSTRO (Photo credit should read MARCELLO PATERNOSTRO/AFP/Getty Images)

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Ivanka Trump speaks during a meeting on action to end modern slavery and human trafficking on the sidelines of the 72nd United Nations General Assembly at U.N. Headquarters in Manhattan, New York, U.S., September 19, 2017. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

She had been recruited by an employment agency in Indonesia in 2010, she said.

Majeed and Abbas, who live with their two children and extended family, could be indicted this week or next, Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Tenorio said.

If convicted, they each face the possibility of up to 25 years in prison and $750,000 in fines, the prosecutor said.

U.S. authorities "will not tolerate any form of human exploitation," said Dave Shaw, special agent with Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego.

"Forced labor, which often involves individuals who are held in isolation, degraded, and most alarming, stripped of their basic human freedom, has no place in a modern society," he said in a statement.