How victims are lured into vice

TELEVISION adverts and interviews in glossy, fashion magazines are being used to urge Lithuania's young women to beware of offers that claim they can earn good money overseas.

Last year, 11 trafficking cases reached Lithuanian courts and since January 2005 they have begun another four, three connected with Britain.

Reda Sirgediene, Interpol's chief officer in Lithuania, was given the task of liaising with British and European forces to deal with the problem in 2002.

"Many of the women are less educated, they don't have work and they meet 'friends' who say you can earn good money abroad," she said.

"These men who look for women in Lithuania, they can just approach them in the street and say do you want to work in the UK? But the girls are cheated right at the airport.

"The model is often the same. The ones who try to recruit women on the streets tend to be young men, in their early twenties. Often they are good-looking.

"They might use a telephone number passed on down a chain of people. and will say they are just calling because someone, a friend, gave me your number. "Sometimes they lie and say they are studying in London and that is why they know they can get them good work.

"Sometimes they say they are sportsmen and they are travelling to Britain for competition or for training, and they say they would like to take this woman with them.

"They lie. And once they arrive at the airport in the UK they have people waiting."

The majority of girls trafficked from Lithuania come from rural areas, where levels of education are lower, unemployment higher and where it is much tougher to survive.

Lithuanian authorities believe native gangs are recruiting and organising the trafficking of women to the UK. Once victims arrive on British soil they are usually sold on to other gangs and, in particular Albanians.

Intelligence suggests large numbers of closely connected small groups of traffickers working across Lithuania.

They are not only running trafficking rings but are also thought to be responsible for other crimes, including guns and drugs.

The victims are also young women, but usually aged over 18. Reda Sirgediene has, however, heard reports of a 12-year-old victim.

She added: "In the beginning they were trying to traffic anyone - women and girls. But now we are seeing, more and more, that they are trafficking adults - women who are over 18.

"The punishments are heavy if you are caught trafficking a minor, a teenager. In the beginning the traffickers did not pay attention to that, but that is no longer the case."

In Lithuania the maximum penalty for trafficking adults is eight years jail and for children 10 years.

Ms Sirgediene understands absolutely why girls like Elena are too afraid to run once they find they have been conned.

Many she sees are raped, beaten, threatened and brainwashed into thinking foreign police cannot be trusted.

"We always ask the victims about the situation they were in. How did they feel? Why didn't they run? And they say they were threatened.

"Some of them say they tried to contact local police, but because they didn't speak the language it was complicated, and people did not understand.

"They were turned back to prostitution and were beaten because they had tried to escape.

"Sometimes they say they even knew where the embassy was, but they said they just didn't know how they could be helped."

Resources are hard-pressed, but Lithuanian authorities are working closely with British and other European police forces to gather intelligence to capture gangs.

And great efforts are being made to try and encourage victims to come forward.

"The problem we have is that people don't want to talk to local police officers," Ms Sirgediene said.

"They are very ashamed to say 'my daughter was working as a prostitute', even if she was forced to do it.

"Officers working in the local police units might be their neighbours or will know their neighbours.

"It is very difficult. Often people only want to contact us directly."

Britain becomes an easy option for trade in misery

HUMAN trafficking gangs are exploiting the expansion of the European Union, and targeting Britain as a prime market for young women forced into prostitution.

International criminals have earmarked Britain as an easy option, with a booming sex trade and where the highest prices are paid in towns and cities in every region, including Yorkshire.

Since it joined the EU last May, Lithuania in particular has emerged as a major source country - with traffickers using cheap flights to bring hundreds of victims to these shores.

One of Lithuania's most senior police officers told the Yorkshire Post between 15 and 20 Lithuanian girls are being brought here every month.

The shocking figures have emerged two months after three Albanian illegal immigrants were jailed in Sheffield for trafficking Elena, the victim who today tells her story in the Yorkshire Post.

Last December, two Albanian illegal immigrants were also jailed in the city for trafficking young Lithuanian women.

Reda Sirgediene, Interpol's chief officer in Lithuania, told the Yorkshire Post, "After May 1 last year, Lithuanians started to travel more often to the UK. Traffickers started getting more money for their victims - three times more than in Germany.

"In Germany they could get E800, E1,000 sometimes E2,000. In the UK they are getting between £3,000 and £4,000."

Before the EU expansion, Lithuanian victims were trafficked, usually overland, to Germany and in smaller numbers to Italy, Spain and Scandinavia. With victims now in possession of EU passports, Lithuanian traffickers have linked with Britain's well-established Albanian gangs and are taking advantage of frequent, cheap and direct flights here.

Border controls with Lithuania's northern neighbour, Latvia, have been relaxed since last May, easing overland passage to the Latvian capital, Riga,

for alternative flights to Britain. The gangs can also get a good price for the EU passports.

Steve Harvey of the EU's Serious Crime Department, Europol, said:

"Traffickers react to market forces; where there is demand, they will make sure there is supply. Clearly in the UK there is a demand by men who want to pay for sex. That is why victims are being trafficked to the UK, else why go to the trouble of getting someone into the UK with all the issues of border control and island crossings?"

South Yorkshire Police's deputy chief constable, Grahame Maxwell, the Association of Chief Police Officers' lead on human trafficking, defines the gaps in intelligence as "vast".

No-one knows how many women and children are trafficked to Britain. Nor are accurate figures available across Europe.

The Government's most recent research put the number five years ago between 142 and 1,420 women. Modest estimates say that has increased 10 per cent a year since. Many believe the true figure much higher.

Globally, the UN puts a £3.6bn price tag on the crime - ranking it alongside guns and drugs.

The European Commission thinks up to 500,000 are trafficked into Europe each year.

Albania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Romania, Ukraine, Russian Federation and Lithuania are the main source countries.

Last year, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and Humberside were among the first regional forces to receive Government money - £2.5m - to tackle the crime, under Operation Reflex. Mr Maxwell said: "It is only as cases come to light that we start to get a real, true picture of what might be happening."

Close links between Lithuanian and South Yorkshire police recently resulted in the arrest of suspected members of the Lithuanian gang which trafficked Elena.

Another trial is pending of three men arrested following other South Yorkshire investigations, and inquiries continue after raids on massage parlours in Sheffield and Leeds last summer.

Last week West Yorkshire's first case came to light, when a 37-year-old Chinese woman was charged with trafficking.

Mr Maxwell added: "We are dealing with people in extremely frightening situations.

"They have come to a foreign country, don't necessarily speak English or any common European language, they are probably quite fearful of approaching the police, they have probably been told not to trust the police or that harm will come to their families in their home country if they do."

Between April 2003 and the end of 2004, Reflex nationally resulted in 65 convictions relating to trafficking or smuggling.

The way cases are dealt with was also recently overhauled, with the introduction of new laws - under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and the Asylum and Immigration Act 2004 - with maximum 14-year jail sentences for trafficking.

Lynne Chitty, who ran a safe house for trafficked children in West Sussex between 1996 and 2000, believes the problem

has "absolutely exploded" with thousands here each year.

She added: "When I first became involved, the UK was a transit country. It is now, most definitely, a destination country.

"And now we have in-country trafficking, from the south to the north."

Care of child victims falls to social services. The only safe house for adult victims is the 25-bed Poppy Project in London.

Anita Tiessen deputy director of Unicef UK said: "Response from social services, police and immigration is inadequate, and this needs to change.

"They need increased guidance and support from central Government."

The merchants who prey on innocence

Other trafficking cases successfully prosecuted in British courts in the last six months:

Luan Plakici

The Albanian, aged 26, had a 10-year jail sentence increased to 23 by the Court of Appeal after trafficking more than 30 women into Britain.

His victims included two Moldovan girls aged 16 who replied to adverts in local papers for work abroad. They were given false Italian documents and sent to London, where they met Plakici.

A third victim was lured from Moldova to the UK and given a false Belgian passport.

Two Romanian sisters, aged 17 and 24, were offered work as waitresses and driven to Prague, where they were sold to Plakici and driven to the UK.

All the girls were raped, beaten and forced to have sex with up to 20 men a day in brothels in London, Bedford, Luton and Reading.

Plakici travelled freely throughout Europe having acquired a British passport in 1999 after arriving in the UK as an asylum seeker.

He was brought to justice when one of the girls managed to escape and alert the police.

He had worked as an interpreter with a number of law firms specialising in immigration.

Taulant Merdanaj and Elidon Bregu

Merdanaj, 27, was jailed for 18 years and Bregu, 19, for nine years after trafficking two Lithuanian women. The women, aged 24 and 21, arrived in Britain last summer believing they were coming for legitimate work. But they were taken to Sheffield, imprisoned in flats in the city's Park Hill area and forced to work as prostitutes at a massage parlour called Club 160 in the city.

The prosecution of Merdanaj and Bregu, both Albanian illegal immigrants, was the first under the human trafficking section of the new Sexual Offences

Act.

Vullnet Ismailaj

The 27-year-old, an Albanian illegal immigrant, was jailed for 11 years in February after trafficking scores of Lithuanian teenagers and young women into Britain.

The victims were brought on the promise of work, but had their passports taken on arrival and were forced to work as prostitutes for up to 13 hours a day, seven days a week, in brothels in London and Birmingham. The bravery of one of his victims enabled vice-squad detectives to bring him to court. The 25-year-old was forced to have sex with 34 men on her first day in Britain. She escaped and called police.

Tricked, raped and sold 'like a doll used for making money'

Elena cups a toy bear in her lap, nervously pinching its feet between her thumbs.

The petite, brown-eyed 16-year-old perches, uncomfortably upright, on the edge of the sofa. She is determined to present herself with poise as she recounts her appalling ordeals of the past 10 months.

This is not the first time she has told her story to strangers; she's given 24 hours of police interview and faced those who raped and abused her in open court.

Two months after returning to Lithuania, she has decided to reopen her wounds and tell her story to the Yorkshire Post. Her hope, she says, is to spare others a similar nightmare.

Her bravery is unquestionable and has overwhelmed the South Yorkshire police officers who brought her traffickers to court. But that determination to see justice done cannot belie her vulnerability.

The bear she holds is a gift from the interpreter at her side. It will join a collection lining the sofa-bed she shares with her sister at home, her grandmother's tiny, one-bedroomed tower-block flat in Lithuania's capital, Vilnius.

This fashion conscious teenager, short fingernails perfectly painted in metallic baby blue, is a young girl but on the cusp of womanhood; a child still at the back of her own mind and absolutely so in the eyes of the law.

And though she has done no wrong, she is burdened by terrible shame.

Elena cannot share the awful truth of her time in England with those who mean most to her. She cannot tell her beloved grandmother or her parents.

She has not told a single friend.

Her only confidante, outside official circles, is her sister, herself only 18.

But, she adds: "We don't talk about it. I try not to think about the past."

Elena's story begins last July, when she was 15 and looking for work during the school holidays.

Lithuania had just joined the European Union. While Vilnius, with its beautiful Baroque old town and smart shopping streets courted tourists, hard-up Lithuanians yearned to taste the opportunity of new sisterlands.

Elena and her friends had sights fixed on London and when her best friend was cold-called with an offer of work, the girls were excited.

"The call was from a young female. She asked if we were interested in working in London for the summer," she recalls.

The schoolfriends met those making the offer within an hour.

"We met on the street outside a shop not far from my house. There were two of them. They were about 17.

"They spent about half an hour with us, said we would get work maybe in a bar or a restaurant. I told them I was under age, but they said no problem. I asked what the guarantee was we would get work. They said 100 per cent."

Elena needed parental permission and asked her father and mother, still her legal guardians though she has lived with her 76-year-old grandmother from being very young. Her father was happy to sign.

Elena's friend was unable to get permission in time, but the girls planned to meet in London.

Four days later Elena was collected by a man named Kastas, 18, who drove her 150 miles north to Siauliai and to the flat of a middle-aged woman called Jolanta and her 10-year-old daughter

Two days later, Kastas drove her across the border to Riga in Latvia and escorted her on a flight to London.

The moment they were through passport control, Elena was forced to hand over her passport and taken to a Heathrow airport bar to meet two Albanian men, Shaban Maka and Ilir Barjami.

They took her to central London, to a bar where they met more Albanian men. She understood not a word they said, but as their eyes flicked over her, there was no question she was the subject of discussion.

Shortly after she was taken to a nearby flat for the night.

The next day, without explanation, she was taken to a Tube station. She watched as money and her passport changed hands and was then told to go with an Albanian man named Bledi. "You're my girl now," he told her.

She was 15 and alone in a country where she barely knew how to order a cup of coffee. She had no idea who she was with, or what he was capable of, but she knew the man who sold her boasted of killing two men.

As soon as Bledi got Elena to his London flat, he raped her.

"He told me to get undressed. I didn't want to, he forced me."

She has her gaze fixed in middle distance. "He just started taking off my clothes. He was saying something I didn't understand. He pushed me on the bed. He wanted sex. I did try to fight him off?"

After raping her, Bledi slept. Elena lay wracked with fear.

"I turned the opposite way and tried to think about other things," she says.

The next morning she was taken to a brothel in a council house in Yardley Wood, Birmingham. She was made to wear a skimpy top and skirt and to wait in the front room with five other young women.

Elena struggles to explain what happened over the following 11 hours.

"They just told me I had to go and I had to do it. I was told to go. I was given the clothing and I was told when the clients come I would have to go upstairs," she says.

"I didn't want to do that kind of thing. But I couldn't do anything. What could I do? I was in a foreign country, where could I go?

"I thought about trying to run. I thought about trying to tell the police.

But I didn't know where to go."

That first evening she was forced to have sex with five English men. They paid £40, but she kept nothing - £20 was taken by the brothel manager and £20 by Bledi.

Elena is again lost for words. Her expression is blank. She has, she says, run out of tears.

"It was just horrible, disgusting. I didn't want any of this. I didn't look at these men, I didn't care how they looked.

"I just wanted to put my head under the pillow.

"I cried," she says. "But only when I was on my own."

She was forced to work day and night, until her Albanian keeper decided it was time she was "his girl" again.

"He didn't care at all how I felt. Every night, after he picked me up, he raped me," she says. "I felt like a doll - a doll used to make money."

Elena tried to escape, asking the brothel manager to help. But she was quickly betrayed and forced back into the hands of Maka.

Time and again the traffickers preyed on Elena's terror, controlling her with threats and then persuading her only they could be trusted.

When she refused to go back to Bledi, she was taken to Coventry and sold, for £3,000, in a car park to Albanian Xhevahir Pisha.

He too kept her prisoner, taking her out only to buy her fast food and to work, at a Leicester sauna.

The next sale was to an Albanian called Ladi, a "gorilla" of a man who lived in London.

The moment he got her home, he tried to rape her.

"He pushed me off the bed and I started crying. I ran out of the room and into the kitchen and I just stood there crying. For about two hours I stayed in the kitchen, crying."

Again Elena was returned to Maka. He gave her a sleeping tablet to drug the next buyer and said if she complied with one more sale, she would get £500 and freedom.

Elena didn't dare drug the man but made her own chance to run away. Maka never gave her the money.

"They sold me to another Albanian man, called John. I was at his house for a week. He treated me very badly," she says.

John expected sex "every half hour" and raped her repeatedly, never using contraception. He then rang the traffickers to complain about her.

Elena was made to suffer for her resistance and slashed her wrists with a razor in desperation.

When the traffickers found what she was doing, they beat her. "I told them they could do anything to me. I didn't care. I told them they could take me anywhere - they could even bury me." In September, she was sold to Ilir Barjami, in Sheffield, who imprisoned her in his Park Hill flat and raped her repeatedly.

One night, after a local sauna refused to have her, he took her to a local nightclub.

Elena finally saw her chance.

"I went to the toilet. He was waiting outside. While I was in there I was crying. I wanted to run away. Some English girls approached me. Somehow I was able to explain and ask for help."

The girls managed to usher Barjami away.

"I saw the exit and I just ran out of the building and down the street. I was out of breath at some point and I stopped and sat next to car. A man was getting out of the car and I asked him the way to the police station."

Elena was at last in safe hands. Bravely she told her story and faced her abusers in court.

"I don't really know why. But perhaps I could just make them think about what they had done," she says.

"But I don't know if I will ever feel safe. Yes they were sent to prison but the time will come when they will be released. If it was up to me the punishment would be the death penalty."

Elena has now returned home and to school.

She says, she doesn't need to think any more about what happened. But this teenager appears to be a young girl suppressing a great deal.

Just occasionally she lets slip a chink in her emotional armour. "I want to be on my own," she says. "Maybe I will get married in the future. But if I am going to have children, I hope it will be a boy."

Copyright © 2005 Johnston Press Company

Published in and reprinted with permission from: The People Traffickers, The Yorkshire Post, 9 May 2005.