Jail for couple who trafficked girls for prostitution

Irishman Thomas Carroll, 48, and his South African wife, former prostitute Shamiela Clark, 32, admitted running the complex and organised business in Ireland from their home, an old vicarage in Pembrokeshire.

Carroll was jailed at Cardiff Crown Court for seven years while his wife got three-and-a-half years.

His daughter Toma Carroll, 26, was jailed for two years for her part in laundering the profits, which in one year amounted to more than 873,000.

The ring was supplied with vulnerable young women and girls who were subjected to bizarre rituals to scare them by traffickers. Some were shoved into coffins and witnessed chicken slaughter before they were sent from Nigeria and coerced into a large and lucrative prostitution ring run by the couple.

Clark ran a "call centre" from where she co-ordinated the brothels and took calls from clients, organised accommodation and placed newspaper adverts.

Robert Davies, prosecuting, said the business used foreign sex workers "so they would not have homes to go to at night".

Most of the young women and girls, one aged just 15, came from South America and Nigeria, with many not knowing they would have to work as prostitutes to pay off the huge debts they were told they owed their traffickers.

Women from Nigeria underwent "terrifying and humiliating" rituals "to put the fear of death in them", Judge Neil Bidder was told.

When many women, who were not trafficked by the defendants, arrived at different locations around Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, they believed they would find work as hairdressers or seamstresses. Instead they were sent to a rented apartment and put to work as prostitutes.

Sentencing, Judge Bidder said the case was "exceptional in its scale".

On the trafficked women from Nigeria, he told the couple: "You did not ask and did not care what personal tragedies had befallen those women submitting for your profit. You were willing to exploit them."

Carroll, of Castlemartin Barracks, Pembroke, South Wales, and Clark, of Gateway Lodge, Pembroke, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to control prostitution for gain and conspiracy to money launder.

They were joined in the dock for sentencing by Carroll's daughter, Toma Carroll, of Carlow in the Republic of Ireland, who had admitted conspiracy to money-laundering.