LAWSUIT: Iraq Contractor Sued For Trafficking Nepali Workers

Many of you remember the brutal killing of 12 Nepali workers in Iraq four years ago.

The Washington Post reports that now a Washington-based law firm, Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, is suing Iraqi contract group KBR (Kellogg, Brown and Root) alleging that it was involved in human trafficking of Nepali workers.

Agnieszka Fryszman, a partner at Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, said 13 Nepali men, between the ages of 18 and 27, were recruited in Nepal to work as kitchen staff in hotels and restaurants in Amman, Jordan. But once the men arrived in Jordan, their passports were seized and they were told they were being sent to a military facility in Iraq, Fryszman said.

As the men were driven in cars to Iraq, they were stopped by insurgents. Twelve were kidnapped and later executed, Fryszman said. The thirteenth man survived and worked in a warehouse in Iraq for 15 months before returning to Nepal.

The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in California on behalf of the workers' families and the survivor, claims that the trafficking scheme was engineered by KBR and its Jordanian subcontractor, Daoud & Partners, according to Fryszman.

Thousands of Nepalis leave the country every year to work in Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar and other surrounding countries. And many end up in the military facilities in Iraq. The Chicago Tribune did an excellent investigative piece on this topic two years ago (for which it also received the SAJA award).

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