Gangsters make £3,000 selling sex slaves in Oxford Street

Rescued: the Lithuanian woman would have been forced to have sex with up to 25 men every day by her traffickers. The Albanian gangster who tried to buy her can be seen handing over £3,000 in cash, circled
12 April 2012

Three pimps negotiate to sell a trafficked woman as a sex slave in Oxford Street.

The surveillance photo, captured by an undercover police officer, shows one Albanian gangster handing over £3,000 in cash to two other men outside Selfridges.

The woman, a Lithuanian in her mid-twenties, can only stand by and watch the deal taking place. She was being guarded by a man standing a few feet to her left.

She was moments from being sold to work in a brothel where she would have been expected to have sex with up to 25 men in a day, earning her new boss up to £100,000 a year.

In this case she was rescued when undercover officers from the Met's Clubs and Vice Unit pounced on the Albanian trafficking gang. Five men were later jailed for a total of 63 years.

Scotland Yard released the image today to highlight fears of an increase in the trafficking of women in the three years until the 2012 Olympic Games. Police have set up a specialist unit to tackle trafficking gangs and vice barons in the run-up to the Games.

They are visiting eastern European countries to warn girls about the dangers of being tricked into travelling to Britain.

One 16-year-old girl believed her boyfriend was bringing her on a romantic weekend to London but she was sold to vice gangs operating in the north of England.

A rise in vice activity has been recorded in the five Olympic boroughs of Newham, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest and Greenwich but this is mainly believed to be connected to demand from the 25,000 Games construction workers.

Detective Chief Superintendent Richard Martin, the head of the Clubs and Vice Unit, said: "We have a number of ongoing operations to tackle trafficking. We have not seen a major rise in trafficking activity associated with the Games at present but if we do we will be able to deal with it quickly.

"We are trying to identify criminal networks which may try and exploit the Olympics. We do not want to see a repeat of what happened in Athens in 2004 when there was a 95 per increase in trafficked women."

Since 2005 the Clubs and Vice Unit has saved 518 women. Most are settled back in their home countries after checks are carried out to ensure they would be safe from gang reprisals. This year 25 women have been rescued.

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