Sex Trafficking Gang Members Jailed

Guardian, Uk, Friday September 29, 2006

Members of a gang that lured a Lithuanian woman to Britain and then sold her into prostitution were today jailed for up to nine years. The woman, who risked her life when she jumped out of a 20 ft-high window to escape the gang, came to the UK from Lithuania after they promised her well-paid work. But what followed was sexual abuse as she was first raped and then forced into prostitution.

Albanian Riza Hoxha, 45, of Ilford, Essex, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring between April 24 and May 24 last year to "traffic a person to the UK for sexual gain".

Jailing Hoxha for eight years the judge, Duncan Matheson, said he had clearly been the "primary moving force in what went on".

Hoxha's accomplice and countryman Ylber "Billy" Dauti, a 23-year-old illegal immigrant living in Golders Green, north-west London, was sentenced to nine years for trafficking and for plotting to cause prostitution for gain.

Lithuanian Ruta Strazdaite, who tricked her friend into prostitution, and Monika "Lilly" Szabova, a Slovakian prostitute, were also convicted of trafficking and prostitution charges, and were sentenced to four years and two and a half years in prison.

The judge told the gang that having lured their "psychologically vulnerable" victim to Britain with false promises of work, they subjected her to a "significant degree of compulsion to act as a prostitute, quite plainly contrary to her wishes".

The judge said that while the woman had recovered physically, "the psychological effect of her experience is in question".

The 36-year-old mother of three, who cannot be named for legal reasons, wept as she told London's Middlesex Guildhall crown court she had been forced to wear lingerie and parade in front of men who paid up to £150 to have sex with her.

Finally, after secretly phoning her family for help, she leapt from one of the brothel's first-floor windows, narrowly missing railings below and shattering her foot. She then contacted the police and was taken to hospital.

She told the court her ordeal had left her vomiting uncontrollably.

"I felt that had I stayed, they would have tortured me to death," she said.
The victim sat in a screened-off witness box as she described being tricked into leaving her family for a life of comparative wealth in London.

She said Strazdaite had promised her £250 a week as a cleaner at Chelsea's Stamford Bridge ground. "That is a lot of money in Lithuania," she said.

But while she had spent her first day washing floors at the stadium, the next day she was driven to a central London brothel and sold to a man referred to in court as Constantinos and described as being on Interpol's "most wanted" list.

The court heard that almost the first thing the pimp did was to force her to perform a sex act on him. She was then escorted to the bathroom, "bathed and shaved everywhere" and put to work in the brothel.

Detective Chief Inspector Steve Bourne of Marylebone CID paid tribute to the victim for her courage in pursuing the case.

"We asked a lot of her in terms of returning to this country and making statements and identifying people... and the fact that she had the resolution to take this to court ... Well, I can't praise her enough," he said.

Det Ch Insp Bourne said the woman had been warned about the dangers of sexual slavery when she entered the country. "She was given advice but at that time she thought she was coming in to work as a cleaner."

The campaigns manager at Anti-Slavery International, Mike Kaye, said hundreds of people were trafficked into Britain each year for sexual and labour exploitation.

Mr Kaye said the situation would be improved if the government signed up to the European convention on trafficking.

"It provides minimum standards of protection and support for trafficked people," he said. "Thirty other countries have signed it and we are not one of them."