Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Lawsuit: Major U.S. defense contractor engaged in human trafficking
WASHINGTON — A leading U.S. defense firm in Iraq is the target of a lawsuit filed by the families of men from Nepal who were taken hostage and executed by an Al Qaida group in Iraq.
KBR, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown and Root, has been sued in federal
district court in California. The suit asserted that former employees had
been victims of human trafficking by KBR — at one point the largest
contractor for the U.S. military in Iraq — and its Jordanian subcontractor,
Daoud & Partners.
The suit, filed on Aug. 27 by relatives of the employees, said KBR and
Daoud abducted Nepali nationals in Jordan and forced them to work in Iraq, Middle East Newsline reported.
In 2004, 13 Nepali men,
ages 18 to 27, were sent to a U.S. military facility in Iraq soon after they
arrived in Amman for what they thought were jobs in hotels and restaurants
in the Jordanian capital.
"Once they arrived in Jordan, however, they were not provided the
expected employment," Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, a Washington law
firm that filed the suit, said. "Instead, their passports were seized, they
were held against their will, and they were told that they were being sent
to work at a military facility in Iraq, the United States Al Asad Airbase.
The men allege that the illicit trafficking scheme — from their recruitment
in Nepal to their eventual employment in Iraq — was engineered by KBR and
its subcontractor Daoud."
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