A Kiwi athlete has fled Rio with his girlfriend after he was abducted by military police and forced to withdraw money from an ATM.
New Zealand jiu-jitsu fighter Jason Lee hightailed it out of Rio after he was kidnapped and extorted by military police, then harassed by nighttime raids on his apartment.
“After the first visit from the police we immediately began to talk about whether leaving was the best option. Once we had the second visit there was no other course of action,” he told New Zealand news website Stuff.
He was initially kidnapped last weekend and forced to withdraw the equivalent of $800 from an ATM by military police.
He reported the matter to the civil police who then filed a report and promised the information would not be shared.
However, soon after police from the military branch then visited his apartment in what he described as an attempt to intimidate him. Two officers have since been taken into custody.
They also reported the matter to the New Zealand Embassy and the State Secretary for Security.
But while the officers were in custody, he and his girlfriend, journalist Laura McQuillan, decided they needed to get out of the country as soon as they could, so they boarded a flight for Toronto, Canada.
“The second time they arrived, in the middle of the night, they had a document that confirmed our fears that information had been passed from the civil police to the military police. It basically confirmed our address had been passed on,” Lee said.
The couple had been living in Rio for close to a year, but since the initial abduction McQuillan had been suffering from constant anxiety.
“When he told me they had taken him to a police base – I mean, you don’t know if they are going to take him out back and beat him up, or do something than worse than beat him up,” she said.
“Since then I have just felt constant anxiety worrying about him.”
Lee has since posted a message on Twitter saying he was thankful to the people of Rio for their hospitality and the support they had showed him during his recent troubles.
“Cariocas [inhabitants of Rio] have lived in fear of their own police for decades, and they’d much rather have reliable public services than stadiums,” he said.
“It the leaders of Rio want a real, lasting Olympic legacy for the city, they know what they need to do.”
Writing for the Sunday Star Times, McQuillan said that as hard as it had been to leave they knew they had done the right thing, but added Lee said ‘My life is ruined’.
“If he wasn’t a foreigner, if I wasn’t a journalist, and if the Olympics weren’t on Rio’s doorstep, we doubt the case would have been handled with the urgency and seriousness that it has,” she wrote.
“Obviously, we’re grateful for their investigations, but this entire debacle is emblematic of wider corruption in Brazil’s public agencies – and that’s the problem that needs solving.”
(Sourced from agencies, Feature image courtesy:9news.com.au)
