By JAKE SORIANO
BONGAO, Tawi-Tawi – Inside a small room at the Tawi-Tawi Provincial Police Station, leaders of the local anti-trafficking task force had been trying to pry information out of five women who had just been intercepted by the police getting off a boat from Zamboanga City.
The five, all of them new faces in Bongao, stirred the suspicion of authorities at the port when they huddled together and made phone calls, uncomfortably waiting for someone to fetch them.
The women were a tough group to crack. Their ages ranged from mid-twenties to early thirties, and they were not at all related to each other, yet they insisted they were in Bongao for a vacation.
But Rosabella Sulani, focal person of the Bongao Inter-agency Task Force Against Trafficking in Persons (BIATFAT), has seen and heard it all 24cialisitalia.com before. Every year, the BIATFAT intercepts hundreds of potential victims of human trafficking, sometimes up to 40 persons a week, mostly undocumented ferry passengers bound for Malaysia to seek employment there.