Couple jailed for prostitution ring

A couple were jailed today for running a multi-million-pound prostitution ring into which women and girls were scared with bizarre rituals.

Irishman Thomas Carroll, 48, and his South African wife Shamiela Clark, 32, admitted running the business in Ireland from their home, an old vicarage in Pembrokeshire, Wales.

Carroll was jailed at Cardiff crown Court for seven years and his wife for three-and-a-half years. His daughter Toma Carroll, 26, was also imprisoned for two years for her part in laundering the profits, which in one year amounted to more than 1 million (£873,000).

The court heard that women and girls were shoved into coffins and shown chickens being slaughtered to "put the fear of death into them" before they were trafficked into prostitution.

Most of them, one aged just 15, came from South America and Nigeria, with many not knowing they would have to work as prostitutes to pay off the huge debts they were told they owed their traffickers.

Carroll and Clark had no part in trafficking the women, but Judge Neil Bidder told the couple: "You were unaware of the personal circumstance of the women who worked in your brothels and you were not responsible for any violence and threats of violence.

"But the Nigerian women who were threatened with dreadful coercion all ended up working for you. You were willing to exploit them."