This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Spanish police have freed eight women who were being held captive in the basement of a brothel in Marbella and sexually exploited by a gang of pimps and drug dealers.

The national police force said the investigation began after a tip-off to its people-trafficking hotline. When officers went to the house on the Costa del Sol they found it was being run as a 24-hour brothel with a bar. They freed the eight women and arrested 21 alleged members of a gang led by a Portuguese family.

“The investigation found that the women were recruited in Spain,” the force said. “Some of them voluntarily sought work at the brothel while others were tricked with offers of work in a ‘massage parlour’. Once there they were subjected to a system of fines, exhausting days and threats.”

Police also discovered that the women were forbidden to leave the basement, and that the gang supplied cocaine and MDMA to its customers.

“Fifty-five grams of MDMA were recovered, along with 5g cocaine, 17 small bags of hashish, 190g of Kamagra, €1,000 in cash, four fake €100 notes, a large number of knives, computers, mobile phones and documents suggesting criminal activity,” the force said.

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It said the operation was part of its wider efforts to tackle human trafficking and sexual exploitation. As well as the hotline, it has an email address where people can report crimes anonymously. So far this year it has received more than 700 reports by phone and email.

Spain, which effectively decriminalised prostitution in 1995, is trying to crack down on trafficking and exploitation. Recent estimates put revenue from Spain’s domestic sex trade at $26.5bn a year, from an estimated workforce of 300,000 people and hundreds of licensed brothels.

The country’s caretaker socialist government has promised to outlaw prostitution, which it calls “one of the cruellest aspects of the feminisation of poverty and one of the worst forms of violence against women”.