Military Intelligence Official Charged With Running Sex Slave Ring

An official with the Defense Ministry's intelligence branch has been charged with leading an international crime ring trafficking women as sex slaves, a senior investigator said Friday. The official, a colonel in the ministry's Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, led a crime syndicate that trafficked more than 130 women from Russia and former Soviet republics to work as prostitutes from 1999 to 2007, said Alexander Sorochkin, head of the Investigative Committee's military investigations directorate, RIA-Novosti reported. Sorochkin did not release the official's name. A total of 13 suspects in the case stand accused of human trafficking, running prostitution rings, forgery, organizing illegal migration and forcing women and minors to work as prostitutes under the threat of violence, Sorochkin said. Ten of the suspects have been placed under arrest, while the remaining three have been released after it was determined that they were not flight risks, he said. Repeated calls to the Investigative Committee's military investigations spokesman, Sergei Zhukov, and to the GRU press office went unanswered Friday. Defense Ministry spokesman Alexander Drobyshevsky said he had no information on the case. The crime syndicate sold women from Russia, Uzbekistan, Moldova, Ukraine and Belarus into sex slavery in several European and Middle East countries, including Isreal, Italy, German, Greece, the Netherlands and United Arab Emirates, Sorochkin said, RIA-Novosti reported. The countries to where the women were purportedly trafficked are major destinations for sex slaves from former Soviet countries, Afsona Kadyrova, a lawyer with the Angel Coalition, an umbrella organization of anti-trafficking NGOs operating in nine Russian regions, told The Moscow Times. In the past two years, the number of women trafficked from former Soviet countries to work in the sex trade has decreased due to rising living standards and increased awareness by potential victims about plots to lure women into forced prostitution, Kadyrova said.