Moscow, April 28: A military court in Russia has sentenced an Israeli citizen to 18 years in prison for running a vast network of female trafficking in the Middle East and Europe.
According to court documents, Avi Yanai and his accomplices were engaged in the business of kidnapping and smuggling hundreds of women, mostly from the former Soviet Union countries, to Israel, Italy, Spain, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates from 1999 to 2007 to work as prostitutes.
The criminal ring is also suspected of being involved in the murder of several of the women while smuggling them.
The international sex trafficking network recruited women with promises of placing them in legitimate work as dancers or waitresses in European countries for a fee of three to five thousand euros.
According to court papers, the women were smuggled by using forged passports stolen from Russian citizens.
“Some people, using false documents, registered fictitious companies in Russia promising people legal work abroad, mostly in Western Europe,” a senior Russian Federal Security Service investigator, Vitaliy Danilov, told Izvestia newspaper.
“They put out advertisements and people came in, bringing documents and pictures. By the time they came back to pick up their documents, work permits and Schengen-zone visas, the companies would be gone. Some 2,500 passports were stolen in all.”
“Once they got abroad, the women would end up in real slavery, sexual slavery. They didn’t get any money, their passports were usually taken and there was no way home,” Danilov added.
According to the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Albania-based network has made a huge profit of tens of millions of dollars for its operators.
So far, 83 members of the women trafficking ring have been identified and arrested across Europe, 14 of them in Russia. Those arrested in Russia have received jail terms ranging from five to 18 years.
——–Agencies