Two held over human trafficking

Two men are still in custody after their arrest on Saturday as part of a a joint investigation with Latvian police into suspected human trafficking.

Two women who were being held against their will in a flat in Dublin as part of a human trafficking ring were freed following a raid on an apartment on Saturday afternoon.

The women, were being held by their captors in a flat over a shop in Palmerstown, west Dublin, but managed to raise the alarm in a series of text messages to friends at home in Latvia. Last night the women were in the care of the State.

The women’s friends rang the Latvian police who in turn contacted the Garda National Immigration Bureau yesterday afternoon. Gardaí believe the two freed women were lured from their native Latvia with promises of employment.

However, the men who arranged their passage and promised them jobs turned on them over the weekend, explaining they must marry two Asian men – one Indian and one Pakistani – in order that the men could get Latvian passports, which would entitle them to live and work anywhere in the EU.

When the women said they would not go along with the plan they were locked into one of the bedrooms of the two-bedroom flat where they were found.

One of the women knew the name of the chief suspect holding them against their will and revealed his identity in her texts to friends at home while locked in to the bedroom of the flat.

Gardaí believe the man has organised scam marriages for payment in the Republic and detectives were keeping his activities under surveillance.

Garda intelligence on the suspect identified the flat in Palmerstown as his operating base when his name was supplied to them by the Latvian police. A team of detectives from the immigration bureau went to the property at about 4pm yesterday and broke down the door in a surprise raid.

They freed the two women, aged 19 and 25 years, from a bedroom where they had been locked in. The chief suspect, a 23 year-old from India, was arrested at the flat as well as a 32-year-old Pakistani man.

The case has emerged at a time when gardaí are investigating hundreds of suspected “sham marriages” and just two months after one of the States’s main marriage registrars said he believed between 10 and 15 per cent of all marriages were bogus.

The ring leader in the case that emerged yesterday is in the Republic on a student visa. He also has a conviction here for an immigration offence. One of the women had a mobile phoned concealed on her.