A complaint by a Colombian woman, in May 2022, was the trigger for the National Police to initiate an investigation that has borne fruit a year later with the dismantling of a criminal organization dedicated to trafficking in human beings for the purpose of sexual exploitation. . It is a female family clan made up of two sisters and one of their cousins who could have run up to six brothels in different parts of the Region and who had Lorca as their center of operations. They collaborated with other people and there are two other arrested, a woman and a man who worked as a taxi driver in the transfers.
According to the proceedings that are being investigated in the Investigating Court number 1 of Lorca, to which LA VERDAD has had access, the first complaint was followed by three others in the months of June and July 2022 and the account of the victims matched. The head of the clan, SGD C, who has dual Colombian and Ecuadorian nationality, recruited women with limited economic resources in South American countries with false promises of work in Spain. She boasted of high purchasing power, she claimed to be a businesswoman and promised them that she would help them bring her family and process the residence permit. He paid them the money for the plane ticket and waited for them at the Murcia train station, but once in Spain he told them that there was no work for them, he withheld their passports to guarantee that they were not going to leave, he intimidated them by telling them that They were irregular in the country and that the Police would arrest them and force them to prostitute themselves in order to pay the debt they had contracted, which was around 1,200 euros.
The clan functioned like a pyramid and in each of the floors, located in Archena, two of them in Murcia, Totana, Lorca and Jumilla, there was a manager (mami). According to the first complaint, the working day lasted from 9 in the morning to 12 at night for up to fifteen consecutive days, followed by another two days of rest. Others report that they had to be available 24 hours a day, without days off, and that the boss kept 60% of the money they earned with the services.
On each floor, up to six women were prostituted, who rotated among those of the organization, they were controlled at all times by means of video surveillance cameras and the daily income of the house ranged in some cases between 800 and 1,000 euros. The four women, three of them are protected witnesses and one anonymous complainant, declared to the Police that they had felt “deceived and humiliated” and that their only purpose for coming to Spain was to work to be able to bring their family. They only let them go when they had paid their debt.
Forced to use drugs
One of the witnesses, who worked in the Totana brothel, stated that “a lot of cocaine was sold” on the floor, and in one of the Murcia brothels, where women could only sleep in the living room because the bedrooms were reserved for services. with clients, they forced them to use cocaine if they asked them to.
The Police established a surveillance device for the organization, intercepted their communications with wiretaps, placed geolocators in the vehicles they used and static surveillance to study the movements of the clan members. They were able to verify how the doormen of the floors where prostitution was practiced and the entrances and exits of the girls, clients and their guards were marked.
The investigation is still open and from the inquiries it is deduced that the criminal organization would be in operation since at least 2020. The number of victims may exceed twenty, and the women may not have denounced for fear of reprisals. The Police verified that the members of the organization had no economic income from known work activities, some were in an irregular situation in Spain and that the head of the clan owned a flat where prostitution was practiced and bought another in the center of Lorca during the investigation of the plot, where he resided.
They face sentences of between eight and twelve years in prison.
Lorca lawyer Pascual Canales defends three of the defendants who are in pretrial detention in the Campos del Río prison since the arrests were made in early May. They face sentences of between eight and twelve years of imprisonment for the crimes of belonging to a criminal organization for trafficking in human beings for the purpose of sexual exploitation and related crimes, such as promoting prostitution, irregular immigration and drug trafficking and against public health. The proceedings have not concluded and the women have not yet given a statement before the judge. He assured, in statements to LA VERDAD, that it is a “complex procedure” due to the number of procedures to be carried out “and that it can be extended over time.
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