Wednesday 30 October UK News feed. In a back street in central Bucharest at 3am, a surly Romanian orders a young woman to open her coat and twirl around. We get doctor's papers. You want see body? She is slim, dark-haired and attractive but is cowed and passive in front of her dead-eyed controllers - two men in their twenties wearing designer jackets.
The next day in a smoky cafe, we agree a price. This is no ordinary business deal. I have just agreed to buy Ileana Petrescu, a year-old Romanian woman. Ileana was forced into prostitution two years ago. I am to be her third "owner" and the first to take her out of her home country. I had made contact with the young woman's controllers through an intermediary two days before we struck the deal.
I had entered the murky underworld of human traffickers by posing as a British "businessman" looking to purchase Eastern European girls to "work" in a club in London. Battle on sex slave trade. Ileana had no say in the sale. When the pimps were there she spoke only once, to assure me, with sad, pleading eyes: "You will not need to beat me. Reaching a deal to buy Ileana and take her to England was disturbingly easy and will come as a shock for Tony Blair and his ministers, who are losing the battle against the gangs trafficking women from countries such as Romania, Ukraine, Lithuania and Albania.
The victims - most of whom are duped into believing that they are going to "normal" jobs as dancers, au pairs and housekeepers - are coerced into prostitution all over Western Europe. Britain is a prime destination, as demand is constant, prices high and immigration controls are perceived to be lax. According to the Home Office, up to 6, girls a year are brought into Britain and sold into the vice industry, many by illegal immigrants and failed asylum-seekers from Eastern Europe.
It is a relentless tide and officers admit that they are struggling against it. The criminals are becoming more brazen. The girls, who believed that they were being taken on holiday to stay with a friend's father, were made to work as prostitutes in London and Sheffield under threat of torture and death, until they escaped. One was raped repeatedly by her Serbian-born pimp, Tasim Axhami, 19, who was jailed for 21 years.
