Thirteen arrested after CCTV footage shows toddlers bound and crammed into tiny room at Indonesia daycare
Videos on social media showed children lying on the floor wearing only diapers, their hands and feet bound with rags.
YOGYAKARTA - Indonesian police have arrested 13 people after shocking images of alleged abuse against small children at a daycare centre went viral, sparking outrage across the nation, officials said Monday.
Police last Friday raided Little Aresha, a daycare centre in Yogyakarta on Java island, following a report from a former employee.
CCTV footage circulating on social media showed children, most under the age of two, lying on the floor wearing only diapers, their hands and feet bound with rags. The police have confirmed that the footage is authentic.
Police said they also found 20 kids crammed into a room just three by three metres (under 100 square feet).
"So far, 13 people have been named suspects" and arrested in the case, city police chief Eva Guna Pandia told reporters in Yogyakarta Monday.
Those in custody include 11 child carers, as well as the headmaster and the head of the foundation that ran the centre.
They will face a rash of charges including child neglect. Other charges may be added as the investigation unfolds.
Pandia said the suspects told police they had tied up some of the kids to prevent them disturbing others.
They claimed the centre was understaffed, with not enough personnel to bathe and dress the children, said Yogyakarta detective Riski Adrian.
The daycare centre accommodated about 100 children, more than half of whom are believed to have been maltreated, according to police.
Parent Noorman Windarto told AFP he was shocked when he received a phone call from a fellow parent last Friday, urging him to pick up his two-year-old son.
He later learnt from police that the boy, who had been attending the centre since he was three months old, was among those to have been tied up.
"My heart was shattered," the 42-year-old civil servant said.
"My wife cried. Most of them (caregivers) were women, and their body language was so tender, so soft-spoken, and appeared to be religious."
Noorman paid about 1.1 million rupiah (about $64) -- half the minimum wage in Yogyakarta -- for each of his two children to attend the centre, since shuttered.
His oldest child, a daughter now aged six, stopped going recently.
She sometimes came home with bruises which the daycare centre said she must have gotten elsewhere, playing, recalled Noorman.
His son had been repeatedly hospitalised with pneumonia, which the father now suspects may have had something to do with him being made to sleep on a cold floor without clothes.
"I am very angry, furious," Noorman said. "They must be punished as severely as possible."
Under Indonesia's child protection law, the suspects risk up to five years' imprisonment and a 100 million rupiah fine. - AFP
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