UPS: - CHRIS - (Nigerian Syndicate Member) phone rings - hallow
UPS: - PRISCILLA - Hallow Chris Listen here I'll get you by the shop
UPS: - CHRIS - But I'm not by the shop
UPS: - PRISCILLA - But I'm coming by the shop now
UPS: - COP - He is going to run
UPS: - COP - Drop her off before the shop, not at the shop. You must jump out before the shop
UPS: - VOICER - Priscilla is only sixteen years old, but already a hardened, Durban prostitute. With her... a member of a special police task force investigating child prostitution. A few days ago, Priscilla was arrested by
the police and is now spilling the beans. She has information on a Nigerian sex and drug syndicate... that enslaves children with drugs and sells them for sex . For almost two weeks, Special Assignment followed the special police task team... as they raided drug and sex houses in Durban, Gauteng
and Bloemfontein... rescuing children and arresting members of the syndicate.
UPS: - PRISCILLA - We go right into that street to get into Mona Street.
UPS: - VOICER - Priscilla's fourteen year-old sister is known in the sex ring as Candice. She's also enslaved by the Nigerian syndicate.
Priscilla told the cops that Candice has been forced to take drugs and is now at the mercy of her pimps. Many girls are injected with heroin and forced to smoke crack/cocaine. This will keep them in line. Priscilla takes the task team to a building in the Point area of Durban where she was once held captive. She thought that Candice might be here. Both sisters are runaways. They can hardly read or write and haven't seen their parents for months.
PRE- TITLE OPERATION PRISCILLA
UPS: - COP - Stand by stand by. Leave, leave, leave.
UPS: - VOICER - This task team was established six weeks ago after the initial break-through in the case. It's made up of members of the Johannesburg dog unit, the child protection unit, Johannesburg metro police and the Serious and Violent crime units.
UPS: - COP - He's going to run.
UPS: - VOICER - It's a small team of only ten. Doon House is a Nigerian stronghold. In virtually every room there are girls - some as young as ten.
Several underage girls are held captive here. Nigerian drug dealers lure girls into their web of sex and deceit when they offer them refuge...and then force-feed them drugs. When they're addicted, they have to pay their pimps for the drugs... by having sex with clients.
UPS: - COP - They're all locked from the outside.
UPS: - VOICER-Candice is not here...but after questioning the suspects new lead emerge. In the meantime, the children found with the syndicate are taken to a place of safety. A second building, Palace Lodge, is raided. By now, the ring leaders know that the cops are on the hunt. They lock doors
and move the girls around. Finally Candice is found locked up in a room.
UPS: - COP - Get down on the ground down, down move
UPS: - COP - Listen relax
UPS: - CANDICE - Please don't do anything to this guy Chris took me all the way from Johannesburg.
UPS: - COP - Relax we have Chris
UPS: - CANDICE - Please don't do anything to this guy. He is a good guy he wanted to send me back to Johannesburg today please
UPS: - COP - The pipes are broken. Watch out for the pipe
UPS: - COP - What are the marks on your back?
UPS: CANDICE- Chris hit me like this.
UPS: - COP - Standstill, standstill just stand there.
UPS: - CANDICE - Chris burnt me with an iron
UPS: - VOICER - The fourteen year old Candice has been enslaved by her Nigerian masters for about seven months. She is now a crack/cocaine and heroin addict. She provides the task team with a harrowing insight into her enslavement. Candice had been fed drugs by her pimp earlier in the day. She
and her sister are both later taken to a place of safety to be
rehabilitated. The task team's worst suspicion has now been confirmed...that this is a nationwide sex ring. Syndicate members are in contact with one another and send girls from one house to another. In fact...there is even a website where pimps can advertise their girls.
UPS: - CANDICE - He gives you three rocks to smoke for free now that a wake it's make you wake up you want more. And then you want more yu go out to make money then you come and you buy more.
UPS: - JONATHAN MARTENS - So child exploitation tends to attract a lot of attention. Because it attracts lot of attention organised crime has to keep it further under ground. They keep it further underground it becomes more
dangerous, becomes more dangerous it becomes more lucrative. And that is how the business works. The more socially condemned and activity is the higher the price
UPS: - COP - If you go Voortrekker road I'll tell you on the radio... The first group must grab the children here. And the others must the flats.
There's a steel gate in front. We must just break that gate because some girls are in the rooms.
UPS: - VOICER - Two days later and the task team is Gauteng. Their target: a Nigerian stronghold in in Benoni on the East Rand. They suspect more girls and children are held here.
UPS: - COP - Here, here. Take this child. Take this child.
UPS: - COP - A white BMW... It's the Nigerians. They're getting away.
UPS: - VOICER - Several more girls are found...some as young as 12. In this room, an East Rand businessman is found having sex with a fifteen year old girl. He is arrested and charged with statutory rape.
UPS: - COP - They cut the cocaine on these mirrors. Even CD covers......
UPS: - ANDRE NEETHLING - This children are told to go out on the streets stand corner. I've got a lot of calls from the community saying this and this corner. Now that they see that there is somebody dealing with this issue are so it in the community face authority face it ensures that her are
where we are today dealing with the matter
UPS: - VOICER - And then, in another room, a discovery that disturbs even the most hardened cop...a child...only three years old...kept captive by Nigerian drugs dealers and pimps.
UPS: - COP - Where is his mother? Who's kid is this? You get away from him.
UPS: - NIGERIAN PIMP - He is my brothers child.
UPS: - COP - Who is your brother?
UPS: - COP - Hey, hey leave the kid alone now.
UPS: - COP - Everybody out (child crying) Look here look here you want to wear this like a bangle, like a necklace. You want to wear it. Do you speak Afrikaans?
UPS: - COP - What is the mother's name?
UPS: - NIGERIAN PIMP - I don't know.
UPS: - COP - You don't know the mother's name. And the father's name?
UPS: - NIGERIAN PIMP - I don't know
UPS: - COP - No way He doesn't know the parents. Just call Supt Neethling.
UPS: - VOCER - Questioned... the Nigerian pimp reveals that the boy is held captive in order to force his mother into prostitution. She's only 20. She refused to take drugs...and so the boy was taken into captivity. Finally they find her. The mother has been on the streets since the birth of her
child three years ago. The police say that although the boy was well-fed, he was kept in a room that was used for sex and prostitution.
UPS: - MOTHER- He said to me he'll keep him there and I must do my business here. They'll keep him there and I must make money for them here.
UPS: - COP - We've got your child. They don't have your child we've got your child.
UPS: - COP - The poor child was so disorientated when we found him there. It couldn't carry on much longer like that.
UPS: - MOTHER - They didn't want to give my child to me. They just allowed him to see me on Sundays.
UPS: - VOICER - The mother and her child were re-united with one another the very next day. They are both now being counselled.
UPS: - JONATHAN MARTENS - Human trafficking has been said to be the third most profitable activity being perpetrated by organised crime It is more profitable less risky than drug trafficking than gun running . Ranking I think it is about three or four old and they been subsequent reports to
suggest that it is at the top
UPS: - COP- The one girl we don't which rooms they're in. The one girl is short and chubby... bobbed red hair...fat with freckles. The other one is coloured with extension in her hair...very dainty... We don't know which rooms. room 201 and 107.
UPS: - VOICER - New information gathered from the suspects now leads the task team to Bloemfontein. By now it's becoming clear that the task team is being fed disinformation by the Nigerian suspects. It's becoming more and more difficult to find girls. Many of the houses they're sent to are empty.
The task team even visited and raided Bloem's hotspots - in the hope of finding young runaways and captives.
UPS: - COP - We'll finish up and come back later.
UPS: - VOICER - In order to get information about underage girls and children held captive by their pimps, they arrest and question street prostitutes. The formation of this task team is a new concept in combating the country's child sex industry. It will now become a regular way of enforcing the law.
UPS - ANDRE NEETHLING- We are making it very difficult for people to commercially sexually exploit children. The task team has formed a new strategy in terms of having mobile on the roads blocks and pulling over vehicles that are riding around in areas where children are being exploited in terms of child prostitution. If we take the person who places the child on the street away we don't have somebody on the street to be exploited by the user. So I think we working from both ways but our focus point is taking the actual person who creates the opportunity for the child to be on street
UPS: - VOICER - The team decides to split up. Some members stay behind in Bloemfontein while the rest return to Johannesburg with new information.
UPS: - VOICER - Back in Johannesburg. The task team follows up on the information that they have gathered in Bloemfontein. They raid several houses in Rosettenville.... In a room, two girls, drugged and exhausted. One is only fifteen, the other 17 or 18. Both girls are from Cape Town where they worked as sex slaves for Nigerians. They were then sold to syndicate members in Johannesburg. Police later found that they were drugged before being transported to the house in Rosettenville. Members of the syndicate prefer to rotate their slaves as clients always prefer "fresh" and "new"
girls". Most of the girls we spoke to said they receive a dose of crack/cocaine from their pimps every morning. This fix is for free the rest of the day and night the girls had to entertain clients in order to pay for the drugs. They didn't see any of the money that their clients paid. It's
simply a life of drug and sex without any hope or future. By now the task team has devised a database of cell phone numbers. This shows how members of the syndicate in Cape Town, Gauteng, Durban and Bloemfontein are connected
to one another. One of the girls confirms a pattern of abuse...where rape is used as a form of punishment when someone tries to escape.
UPS: - GIRL - My water was running in a bath and then when I heard rape, help
UPS: - COP - How old was she?
UPS: - GIRL - It sounded like a white girl
UPS: - COP - How old was she?
UPS: - GIRL - I don't know
UPS: - VOICER - Today the Commissioner of Police has decided to increase the size of the task team .... And that its members should have all the resources they need to clamp down on child sex.
UPS: - JOHNATHAN MARTENS - We need to have this thing criminalised cause it will empower police to investigate. Once police start to investigate we will get a better sense of the scale of this problem. The extent to which organised crack criminal syndicate that are in this country are using
trafficking to run profits for themselves. We will get sense of how much money they are earning. At the moment we have no idea but any of these things. We know it's happening we know it's a problem but we don't know the extent of the problem. The sexual offence bill I believe for example has
included now provision to criminalized trafficking for sexual purposes
UPS: - VOICER - By late last night, 72 Nigerians involved or implicated in the child sex ring had been arrested. Several of them have been charged with kidnapping, statutory rape and drug dealing. Thirty children have been rescued. Most are in places of safety where they are undergoing rehabilitation.
UPS: - PRISCILLA - Hallow Chris Listen here I'll get you by the shop
UPS: - CHRIS - But I'm not by the shop
UPS: - PRISCILLA - But I'm coming by the shop now
UPS: - COP - He is going to run
UPS: - COP - Drop her off before the shop, not at the shop. You must jump out before the shop
UPS: - VOICER - Priscilla is only sixteen years old, but already a hardened, Durban prostitute. With her... a member of a special police task force investigating child prostitution. A few days ago, Priscilla was arrested by
the police and is now spilling the beans. She has information on a Nigerian sex and drug syndicate... that enslaves children with drugs and sells them for sex . For almost two weeks, Special Assignment followed the special police task team... as they raided drug and sex houses in Durban, Gauteng
and Bloemfontein... rescuing children and arresting members of the syndicate.
UPS: - PRISCILLA - We go right into that street to get into Mona Street.
UPS: - VOICER - Priscilla's fourteen year-old sister is known in the sex ring as Candice. She's also enslaved by the Nigerian syndicate.
Priscilla told the cops that Candice has been forced to take drugs and is now at the mercy of her pimps. Many girls are injected with heroin and forced to smoke crack/cocaine. This will keep them in line. Priscilla takes the task team to a building in the Point area of Durban where she was once held captive. She thought that Candice might be here. Both sisters are runaways. They can hardly read or write and haven't seen their parents for months.
PRE- TITLE OPERATION PRISCILLA
UPS: - COP - Stand by stand by. Leave, leave, leave.
UPS: - VOICER - This task team was established six weeks ago after the initial break-through in the case. It's made up of members of the Johannesburg dog unit, the child protection unit, Johannesburg metro police and the Serious and Violent crime units.
UPS: - COP - He's going to run.
UPS: - VOICER - It's a small team of only ten. Doon House is a Nigerian stronghold. In virtually every room there are girls - some as young as ten.
Several underage girls are held captive here. Nigerian drug dealers lure girls into their web of sex and deceit when they offer them refuge...and then force-feed them drugs. When they're addicted, they have to pay their pimps for the drugs... by having sex with clients.
UPS: - COP - They're all locked from the outside.
UPS: - VOICER-Candice is not here...but after questioning the suspects new lead emerge. In the meantime, the children found with the syndicate are taken to a place of safety. A second building, Palace Lodge, is raided. By now, the ring leaders know that the cops are on the hunt. They lock doors
and move the girls around. Finally Candice is found locked up in a room.
UPS: - COP - Get down on the ground down, down move
UPS: - COP - Listen relax
UPS: - CANDICE - Please don't do anything to this guy Chris took me all the way from Johannesburg.
UPS: - COP - Relax we have Chris
UPS: - CANDICE - Please don't do anything to this guy. He is a good guy he wanted to send me back to Johannesburg today please
UPS: - COP - The pipes are broken. Watch out for the pipe
UPS: - COP - What are the marks on your back?
UPS: CANDICE- Chris hit me like this.
UPS: - COP - Standstill, standstill just stand there.
UPS: - CANDICE - Chris burnt me with an iron
UPS: - VOICER - The fourteen year old Candice has been enslaved by her Nigerian masters for about seven months. She is now a crack/cocaine and heroin addict. She provides the task team with a harrowing insight into her enslavement. Candice had been fed drugs by her pimp earlier in the day. She
and her sister are both later taken to a place of safety to be
rehabilitated. The task team's worst suspicion has now been confirmed...that this is a nationwide sex ring. Syndicate members are in contact with one another and send girls from one house to another. In fact...there is even a website where pimps can advertise their girls.
UPS: - CANDICE - He gives you three rocks to smoke for free now that a wake it's make you wake up you want more. And then you want more yu go out to make money then you come and you buy more.
UPS: - JONATHAN MARTENS - So child exploitation tends to attract a lot of attention. Because it attracts lot of attention organised crime has to keep it further under ground. They keep it further underground it becomes more
dangerous, becomes more dangerous it becomes more lucrative. And that is how the business works. The more socially condemned and activity is the higher the price
UPS: - COP - If you go Voortrekker road I'll tell you on the radio... The first group must grab the children here. And the others must the flats.
There's a steel gate in front. We must just break that gate because some girls are in the rooms.
UPS: - VOICER - Two days later and the task team is Gauteng. Their target: a Nigerian stronghold in in Benoni on the East Rand. They suspect more girls and children are held here.
UPS: - COP - Here, here. Take this child. Take this child.
UPS: - COP - A white BMW... It's the Nigerians. They're getting away.
UPS: - VOICER - Several more girls are found...some as young as 12. In this room, an East Rand businessman is found having sex with a fifteen year old girl. He is arrested and charged with statutory rape.
UPS: - COP - They cut the cocaine on these mirrors. Even CD covers......
UPS: - ANDRE NEETHLING - This children are told to go out on the streets stand corner. I've got a lot of calls from the community saying this and this corner. Now that they see that there is somebody dealing with this issue are so it in the community face authority face it ensures that her are
where we are today dealing with the matter
UPS: - VOICER - And then, in another room, a discovery that disturbs even the most hardened cop...a child...only three years old...kept captive by Nigerian drugs dealers and pimps.
UPS: - COP - Where is his mother? Who's kid is this? You get away from him.
UPS: - NIGERIAN PIMP - He is my brothers child.
UPS: - COP - Who is your brother?
UPS: - COP - Hey, hey leave the kid alone now.
UPS: - COP - Everybody out (child crying) Look here look here you want to wear this like a bangle, like a necklace. You want to wear it. Do you speak Afrikaans?
UPS: - COP - What is the mother's name?
UPS: - NIGERIAN PIMP - I don't know.
UPS: - COP - You don't know the mother's name. And the father's name?
UPS: - NIGERIAN PIMP - I don't know
UPS: - COP - No way He doesn't know the parents. Just call Supt Neethling.
UPS: - VOCER - Questioned... the Nigerian pimp reveals that the boy is held captive in order to force his mother into prostitution. She's only 20. She refused to take drugs...and so the boy was taken into captivity. Finally they find her. The mother has been on the streets since the birth of her
child three years ago. The police say that although the boy was well-fed, he was kept in a room that was used for sex and prostitution.
UPS: - MOTHER- He said to me he'll keep him there and I must do my business here. They'll keep him there and I must make money for them here.
UPS: - COP - We've got your child. They don't have your child we've got your child.
UPS: - COP - The poor child was so disorientated when we found him there. It couldn't carry on much longer like that.
UPS: - MOTHER - They didn't want to give my child to me. They just allowed him to see me on Sundays.
UPS: - VOICER - The mother and her child were re-united with one another the very next day. They are both now being counselled.
UPS: - JONATHAN MARTENS - Human trafficking has been said to be the third most profitable activity being perpetrated by organised crime It is more profitable less risky than drug trafficking than gun running . Ranking I think it is about three or four old and they been subsequent reports to
suggest that it is at the top
UPS: - COP- The one girl we don't which rooms they're in. The one girl is short and chubby... bobbed red hair...fat with freckles. The other one is coloured with extension in her hair...very dainty... We don't know which rooms. room 201 and 107.
UPS: - VOICER - New information gathered from the suspects now leads the task team to Bloemfontein. By now it's becoming clear that the task team is being fed disinformation by the Nigerian suspects. It's becoming more and more difficult to find girls. Many of the houses they're sent to are empty.
The task team even visited and raided Bloem's hotspots - in the hope of finding young runaways and captives.
UPS: - COP - We'll finish up and come back later.
UPS: - VOICER - In order to get information about underage girls and children held captive by their pimps, they arrest and question street prostitutes. The formation of this task team is a new concept in combating the country's child sex industry. It will now become a regular way of enforcing the law.
UPS - ANDRE NEETHLING- We are making it very difficult for people to commercially sexually exploit children. The task team has formed a new strategy in terms of having mobile on the roads blocks and pulling over vehicles that are riding around in areas where children are being exploited in terms of child prostitution. If we take the person who places the child on the street away we don't have somebody on the street to be exploited by the user. So I think we working from both ways but our focus point is taking the actual person who creates the opportunity for the child to be on street
UPS: - VOICER - The team decides to split up. Some members stay behind in Bloemfontein while the rest return to Johannesburg with new information.
UPS: - VOICER - Back in Johannesburg. The task team follows up on the information that they have gathered in Bloemfontein. They raid several houses in Rosettenville.... In a room, two girls, drugged and exhausted. One is only fifteen, the other 17 or 18. Both girls are from Cape Town where they worked as sex slaves for Nigerians. They were then sold to syndicate members in Johannesburg. Police later found that they were drugged before being transported to the house in Rosettenville. Members of the syndicate prefer to rotate their slaves as clients always prefer "fresh" and "new"
girls". Most of the girls we spoke to said they receive a dose of crack/cocaine from their pimps every morning. This fix is for free the rest of the day and night the girls had to entertain clients in order to pay for the drugs. They didn't see any of the money that their clients paid. It's
simply a life of drug and sex without any hope or future. By now the task team has devised a database of cell phone numbers. This shows how members of the syndicate in Cape Town, Gauteng, Durban and Bloemfontein are connected
to one another. One of the girls confirms a pattern of abuse...where rape is used as a form of punishment when someone tries to escape.
UPS: - GIRL - My water was running in a bath and then when I heard rape, help
UPS: - COP - How old was she?
UPS: - GIRL - It sounded like a white girl
UPS: - COP - How old was she?
UPS: - GIRL - I don't know
UPS: - VOICER - Today the Commissioner of Police has decided to increase the size of the task team .... And that its members should have all the resources they need to clamp down on child sex.
UPS: - JOHNATHAN MARTENS - We need to have this thing criminalised cause it will empower police to investigate. Once police start to investigate we will get a better sense of the scale of this problem. The extent to which organised crack criminal syndicate that are in this country are using
trafficking to run profits for themselves. We will get sense of how much money they are earning. At the moment we have no idea but any of these things. We know it's happening we know it's a problem but we don't know the extent of the problem. The sexual offence bill I believe for example has
included now provision to criminalized trafficking for sexual purposes
UPS: - VOICER - By late last night, 72 Nigerians involved or implicated in the child sex ring had been arrested. Several of them have been charged with kidnapping, statutory rape and drug dealing. Thirty children have been rescued. Most are in places of safety where they are undergoing rehabilitation.