Spanish police said Sunday they had
broken up a ring that smuggled in women from Nigeria and forced them into
street prostitution by burning them with irons and using voodoo rituals.
Police arrested six Nigerian
nationals, including the suspected woman ringleader, as part of an
investigation launched last year after one of the prostitutes filed a complaint
with the authorities.
"The control exercised over women
was total, involving verbal threats as well as physical violence and various
voodoo ceremonies to terrorise them," police said in a statement.
"The ring caused them serious
injury through bites or by using an iron to cause second-degree burns."
The ring recruited women in Benin
City, a run-down Nigerian port, whose husbands and fathers had died and who
were struggling to raise their children.
They transported the women overland to
Morocco and then smuggled them on small wooden boats into Spain where they were
forced to work as street prostitutes in Barcelona and Malaga.
Spanish police have swooped several
times in past years on similar prostitution rings that used the threat of
voodoo curses to frighten their victims into obedience.
Before leaving Nigeria, the rings
often take their victims to shrines where they swear to pay their debts to the
group and not to denounce them to the police.
The women leave fingernails, hair,
underwear and other personal items at the shrines which they are told will give
voodoo priests the power to harm them wherever they are in the world.
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