Dutch police hunt fugitive human trafficker

Dutch police were hunting Thursday for one of the country's most notorious human traffickers after he fled while on a temporarily release from prison to visit his wife and newborn baby.

A court's decision last week to allow Saban Baran out of his cell for a week to visit his family has caused outrage in the Netherlands, where he was serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence for human trafficking.

"We are talking here about a terrible blunder in the law," said Fred Teeven, a former senior prosecutor who is now a lawmaker for the center-right Liberal Party.

Baran, 38, was convicted last year of leading a gang notorious for forcing more than 100 women into prostitution, tattooing some of them to mark them as the gang's property. Prosecutors also say some women who came from Germany and eastern Europe were forced to have breast implants and illegal abortions while working in brothels in Amsterdam and other Dutch cities.

Police in the Netherlands are hunting for Baran and police forces in other countries have been alerted to be on the lookout for him, prosecution spokesman Wim de Bruin said.

Dutch authorities informed Interpol about the man's disappearance over the weekend because he was born in Turkey and there are fears he has fled there.

Baran was appealing his conviction, but prosecutors are appealing his sentence as too light.

Facing public criticism, judges at Arnhem Appeals Court took the unusual step of explaining why they released one of the country's most notorious criminals.

Prosecutors initially had agreed to let Baran out for two days but judges in Arnhem extended the leave to seven days.

Prosecutors later appealed for his release to be canceled, saying they had received "concrete signals" he might flee.

But appellate judges refused to order Baran back to his cell, saying it was not clear he had breached any conditions of his release. Only after he disappeared did judges revoke his release.

Teeven said he was surprised prosecutors agreed to a brief release in the first place.

"You wonder why, when police and prosecutors expended so much energy putting this man behind bars," he told NOS radio.

He said he would recommend to the justice minister that the leeway judges have to release such criminals be restricted so that anybody sentenced to more than five years could be released only if he or she were suffering serious health problems.

"This sort of person should not be released with the permission of prosecutors," he said. "It would have been much simpler to say 'you don't visit your child, your child visits you in prison.'"