A South Asian pensioner has been convicted of trafficking and exploiting an African woman she used as a slave

A London suburb might not be an obvious location for modern day slavery, but there can be little doubt that is what 47-year-old Mwanamisi Mruke suffered at the hands of Saeeda Khan. The 68-year-old hired Mruke in her native Tanzania in 2006 after she was made redundant from the hospital in Dar es Salaam run by Khan and her late husband. Khan arranged a domestic service visa and promised to pay her £21 a month into her Tanzanian bank account and £10 a month pocket money in London. Mruke, desperate to fund her daughter Zakia's college education, agreed. But when she got to London, Khan took her passport away, forced her to sleep on the kitchen floor and gave her two slices of bread a day for food. Her clothes were kept in a garden shed. Between 6 A.M. and midnight each day, Mruke was expected to be at the beck and call of Khan, who would ring a bell when she or her two grown-up, disabled children wanted something. Sometimes she would even be woken during the night to take Khan's son out for a walk. Mruke did not get a single day off in four years. Trapped in the house in Harrow, north-west London, unable to speak English and terrified by threats Khan made about her relatives in Tanzania, Mruke was cowed into submission. After a while, the pittance she was being paid dried up completely. Khan refused to let her return home after the deaths of her mother and father or for her daughter's wedding in 2009. Eventually, in February 2010, during a visit by Mruke to her local GP, the doctor and an interpreter - Rhoda Mwanga - became concerned about her living conditions and her interaction with Khan. Mwanga contacted a charity, Kalayaan, which looks out for people trafficked into domestic servitude. It in turn rang the police. Ten days later, police officers, accompanied by Mwanga and staff from Kalayaan, visited Khan's home and took Mruke to a place of refuge. Khan was arrested and later charged with trafficking a person for exploitation. Det Insp Kevin Hyland, who headed the investigation, said it was the first time someone had been prosecuted for trafficking a slave for domestic servitude. He said the Metropolitan Police were currently investigating another 15 cases of trafficking for forced labor, and had worked with forces in Surrey, Sussex, Hertfordshire and the West Midlands on similar cases. Hyland said the cases under investigation involved individuals from Saudi Arabia, India, Bangladesh, Tanzania, Uganda and Vietnam.