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Saturday June 9 2:17 AM ET

Indonesian Police Detain Girl, 4, with Australians

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A four year-old girl was among 20 Australians and a dozen other foreigners being detained by Indonesian police after attending a human rights seminar, Australian officials said on Saturday.

The girl, Zoe Hinman from Sydney, was accompanying her parents, Pip Hinman and Peter Boyle at the human rights meeting, officials said.

Officials also confirmed that Helen Jarvis, an Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales, was among the detainees.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who declined to list the identities of Australians involved, said other detainees were from New Zealand, Britain, the United States, Thailand, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, Pakistan and Germany.

Indonesian police detained the participants until late on Friday night after breaking up the human rights seminar. The police called the detainees in again on Saturday for further questioning.

Police have said the seminar participants were being detained for suspected immigration violations.

Participants at the seminar, attended by some 300 people, said police brandishing guns stormed a hotel on the outskirts of Jakarta on Friday afternoon where the event on Asian worker and human rights was taking place, and detained the foreigners.

Jakarta police spokesman Anton Bahrul Alam said the foreigners were still being questioned and a decision would be made at 3:00 p.m. (0800 GMT) on what to do with them.

Some Indonesian activists were also detained but had since been released.

``They (the foreigners) are still being detained now...What we are examining basically is whether they have violated the (immigration) law. They were allowed to enter as tourists, and nothing else,'' Alam told Reuters in Jakarta.

Alam said the conference was halted because of the presence of the foreigners. Seminar organizers accused police of claiming the event was aimed at disrupting an impeachment hearing of embattled President Abdurrahman Wahid scheduled for August.

An Australian embassy spokesman in Jakarta said he hoped the issue would be resolved on Saturday. He said some foreigners had stayed overnight at a Jakarta police station while others were allowed to leave on condition they return on Saturday morning.

One participant said the raid caused some panic.

``Maybe 50 or 60 police stormed into the meeting room armed with guns, including rifles held in an offensive stance,'' Max Lane, an Australian, said on ABC radio on Saturday.

``They barked something over a loudspeaker in Indonesian language, creating quite a tense and worrying situation.''

A spokeswoman for Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said the Australians had been forced to surrender their passports to Indonesian authorities.

``We will push for a speedy resolution but can't interfere with the judicial process,'' the spokeswoman said.

Foreigners attending conferences in Indonesia normally need to obtain visas beforehand. Many foreign nationals, including Australians, can enter Indonesia as tourists without visas.