Sunday Mirror Investigation: I SELL KIDS FOR SEX

Sunday Mirror, Jan 6, 2002 by GRAHAM JOHNSON

CHILD sex slaves can be bought in Britain for as little as 500, a Sunday Mirror investigation can reveal. One evil trafficker offered to sell our reporters two girls from Cuba - one aged just 11 - to be forced into prostitution.

Aktham Zuhair Salem Madanat boasted: "The girls are barely out of puberty - 11,12, 13, 14 - but they have the bodies of older women.

"Already by the time they are 10 or 11...the way Cuban girls move their bodies ...everything is for the pleasure of men. I can get them to London for about 500. They can earn that back in one week."

Bogus asylum seeker Madanat said he charged 75 a day for his services in procuring the girls - and a percentage of their earnings as prostitutes. But he bragged that a single child prostitute could generate up to 1,000-a-week.

We launched our investigation after one of Britain's top judges highlighted the horrific trade. Family Division Judge Peter Singer urged the Government to introduce new anti-trafficking laws to stop the flow of an estimated 1,400 women and children to the UK for prostitution every year.

Schoolgirls as young as 10 from Cuba, Nigeria and Albania are being brought to Britain by traffickers to work as enslaved prostitutes. They are locked up in windowless brothels, beaten and plied with drugs while forced to have sex with men for 70-a-time.

Their pimps split the profits with the traffickers and the slave girls get pocket-money, make-up and cheap clothes in return. The slaves are told they can earn their freedom - the return of their confiscated passports and the chance to stay in the UK - if they work for the period of bonded labour, normally two years.

Sunday Mirror investigators were put on the trail of the child sex traffickers by a tip-off. We were told that prostitution rings operate out of the notorious London Park Hotel in the capital's Elephant and Castle district.The hotel houses 500 asylum seekers and refugees.

Drugs, fake passports and stolen property are all openly for sale in the foyer from menacing gangs of Albanians and Arabs. One Albanian had hidden a 1ft-long kitchen knife underneath a sofa cushion for a pre-planned attack on a rival gang. The handle was covered in anti- fingerprint tape.

An investigator posed as the owner of a hostess bar and brothel to infiltrate the sex slave gangs. He arrived at the hotel and waited in the foyer. Within 20 minutes he was approached TWICE by men offering to supply girls.

The first, an Albanian called Alex, said he could provide Albanian and Polish prostitutes already working in Britain. The second, 38- year-old Madanat, described how he could bring girls into the UK from Cuba.

Madanat claimed political asylum in Britain three months ago by pretending that he is an Iraqi national called Salem, forced to flee persecution by Saddam Hussein. Later he confessed his asylum claim was bogus. He is really a Jordanian national with no threat to his life.

He has a house in his home town of Amman, a mansion and farm in Cuba and family businesses the US. Meanwhile British taxpayers are shelling out for the upkeep of his Cuban wife and four children, who he brought over from Havana, and are now all residents at the London Park Hotel claiming benefits.

Madanat said: "I can bring over seven girls right now from Cuba.There are four aged between 16 and 21 or 22. And another who is 26 or 27. There are two young girls - one is 11. They are farm girls, very simple and easily controlled. They are desperate to get out of Cuba because of the poverty.

"I have to give the girls' parents 200 dollars and then they are ours. That's a huge amount over there - six months wages. The parents know where their girls are going but they are desperate .

"They hope the girls will send back money or meet a rich man and get married."

Madanat said the girls were from his wife's home village, seven hours drive from Havana.

He showed our investigators a home video of his daughter's birthday party in his house there, which was luxuriously decorated by Cuban standards and equipped with all mod cons. He told how had invited the local village girls to the party and shot the video.

Now he was using the video to sell the girls into prostitution.

The girls are playing, drinking pop and eating slices of two big birthday cakes.

Little did they know, as they laughed and coyly shied away from the video camera, that 3,000 miles away in Britain the film would be used to sell them into a life of slavery.

The child prostitutes travel to Britain using false names and documents supplied by Madanat.

They are accompanied on the journey by an older woman travelling on a work visa who pretends the girls are her children.

Madanat said: "If you are not happy with the girls in the video, I will take you to Cuba and you can pick your own. You can try them out before you buy.

"The youngest I've had is 13. I picked her up on the side of the road. I will take you to a school where they will flock around your car."

He added: "I will arrange the paperwork and the visas. I have a lawyer in Havana who does that. It costs about 100 dollars.