national

Women Sold For Sex After Horrific Ordeals

A couple who ran a prostitution ring in which young women were subjected to terrifying ordeals before being forced to work in brothels have been jailed.

Irishman Thomas Carroll, 48, was sentenced to seven years while his South African wife, Shamiela Clark, 32, was jailed for three-and-a-half.

They ran a series of brothels in Ireland, including Sligo, and Northern Ireland from their home, an old vicarage in Pembrokeshire.

Carroll's daughter, 26-year-old Toma Carroll, was imprisoned for two years for her part in laundering the profits, which in one year were more than a million euros (about £873,000).

Cardiff Crown Court heard that the ring was supplied with women and girls - as young as 15 - from Nigeria and South America.

Many thought they would be working in Ireland and the UK as hairdressers and seamstresses. But once they arrived they were told they would have to pay off the debt they owed to their traffickers by working in brothels.

Robert Davies, prosecuting, said the business used foreign sex workers "so they would not have homes to go to at night".

Women from Nigeria underwent "terrifying and humiliating" rituals involving menstrual blood, the killing of chickens and being pushed into a coffin "to put the fear of death in them", Judge Neil Bidder was told.

Clark, a former prostitute, ran a "call centre" where she co-ordinated the brothels and took calls from clients, organised accommodation and placed adverts in newspapers.

There were around 35 brothels operating on both sides of the Irish border.

Sentencing, Judge Bidder said the case was "exceptional in its scale".

On the trafficked women from Nigeria, he told the couple: "I'm not sentencing you for trafficking those women and accept 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 did not ask and did not care what personal tragedies had befallen those women submitting for your profit. You were willing to exploit them."

He added that they must bear some of the responsibility for the women's plight.

Carroll, of Castlemartin Barracks, Pembroke, South Wales, and Clark, of Gateway Lodge, Pembroke, had both pleaded guilty to conspiracy to control prostitution for gain and conspiracy to money-launder.

Toma Carroll, of Carlow in the Republic of Ireland, admitted conspiracy to money-launder.