A WOMAN has been found guilty of trafficking women from Nigeria to be used in the sex trade and has been handed a eight-year sentence.
Lizzy Idahosa, 24, was convicted and sentenced by a judge at Cardiff Crown Court, while her partner Jackson Omoruyi, 41, was jailed for two years after being found guilty of money laundering charges.
During her trial, the court heard how Idahosa put the victims through a “juju” ceremony and then forced the women to work in brothels to pay back £50,000, a figure she claimed was spent on fraudulent entry documents and travel from Nigeria.
Members of the jury heard that the trafficked women went through a “kind of hell”.
The ritualistic juju ceremony involved making the women to eat reptiles, snails, and sufer razor cuts.
Idahosa moved the women to a number of brothels around the UK, including some in Brighton, Swansea and Cardiff.
In June 2013, the crimes came to light after police found one of the women working in Cardiff and established she was a victim of trafficking. Police and a criminal investigation team from the Home Office initiated an investigation, leading to the arrests of Idahosa and Omoruyi in April this year.
When passing sentence on Idahosa, judge Tom Crowther QC said: “You were the prime mover in this scheme.
“You targeted vulnerable young women and kept them in a kind of hell.
“You forced them to pay an arbitrary debt with their bodies day in day out. And you made significant sums from them.”
The judge added that the victims “lived under mental terror of breaking these promises.”
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