Attack and robbery

I'm an expatriate woman working in the travel industry and I have been living in Bali for several years. As a woman, I have always felt safe walking and driving around the island. However, over the past year, there have been an increasing number of muggings involving women, particularly expatriate women driving in the Jl. Oberoi and Jl. Peti Tenget area.

Most of the women were riding a bike or motorbike and were stopped, or driven off the road by two Indonesian men on a motorbike. In some of these incidents, the women were threatened with knives, before being robbed.

On March 17, 1997, on my way back from work, I turned into the small road leading to Banjar Umulas Kauh, near Jl. Peti Tenget, and two men overtook me very quickly. A few seconds later, they stopped and one of the men jumped off the bike. He came towards me with a knife and without a word snatched my bag, even though I was already taking it off in order to give it to him. He slashed my arm in the process.

The two men drove away leaving me with a deep knife wound, which required three hours of stitching in Sanglah hospital.

At least twelve attacks have been reported over the past year, all within a five kilometer area. If the police are aware of these attacks and Intelligence Agency are supposedly "working on the problem", why isn't more being done to prevent further attacks?

Name and address

known to the editor