In the sex dungeon: Pictures of underground lair where fireman kept six women as slaves for two years




The hostesses in the karaoke bars of Luoyang city in China's Henan province were the prey for Li Hao.

The former firefighter, 34, cruised the joints, picking his targets and then kidnapping them to inflict regular abuse of gut-wrenching depravity.

Two of the six sex slaves that Li allegedly kept in hideous underground confinement died, but four have now been rescued from their suffering.

Today, we are able to show an artist's impression of the two 'unimaginably sophisticated' small rooms in which the women were said to have been held, and the barbarity becomes horribly clear.



Dungeon: A former fireman would enter his sex lair through this, one of seven security doors, to rape girls who were too weak to resist

Slavery: The complex in the central Chinese city of Luoyang where former fireman Li Hao kept women to use for sex

The secret rooms, dug four metres under his rented basement and hidden behind seven iron doors, were located in a residential complex away from his home, where his wife and son lived unaware of the alleged kidnappings, according to the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper .

A police official confirmed that a man who works for the city's technological supervision bureau had been taken into custody.

The paper reported that Li regularly raped the nightclub and karaoke bar workers and would give them food only once every two days to keep them physically weak.

It described the rooms the women ate, slept and defecated in as dank and smelly.



Some of his captives started competing with one another for his attention, the report said, and two of them ended up fighting, it claimed.

Li then allegedly killed one of them with the help of another woman.

He also reportedly killed one of the other women who was said to have been 'disobedient', and buried both bodies in the corner of one of the rooms.



Li only let some of the women out when he wanted them to perform sexual services for other men to earn money for him, the paper claimed.



It was on one of these outings that one of the women, a 23-year-old, escaped and went to the police, according to the report.

Dungeon: The underground room, like the neighbouring one pictured here, contained computers, but the 'residents' did not have access to the internet

Li was apparently caught earlier this month as he tried to escape the city.

Despite the horrific suffering they endured, the women, who have now been released, reportedly said they bore no malice to their captor.

They were supplied with computers, video games and DVDs to entertain themselves. But they were not allowed to use the internet.

A local Chinese police chief has now apologised and suspended four officers over the incident, the official Xinhua news agency said on Saturday.

Kidnapped: All of the victims worked as hostesses in karaoke bars in Luoyang (left). Li is accused of keeping his female victims weak by underfeeding them



Guo Congbin, director of the public security bureau of Luoyang in central China, told a police meeting that the case showed community safety patrols were weak and officers had lost their sense of responsibility, Xinhua said.



'As the police chief, I bear the responsibility,' Guo was quoted as saying, adding that he had suspended the work of four police officials over the case.



Southern Metropolis Daily reporter Ji Xuguang, who was the first to report the case, said he had left Henan province after he was 'threatened' and interrogated by officials who demanded he reveal his source, the China Daily reported.