An accused leader of a child exploitation ring in Spain has been accused by authorities of prostituting his own daughter while presenting her as an adult on sexual websites.
The man is believed to be one of the heads of a child exploitation network and is one of 37 people arrested by the Spanish national police on charges of sexual abuse of minors, corruption of minors and other crimes relating to the sexual exploitation of children.
The network is said to have been comprised mostly of immigrants from the Dominican Republic along with Moroccans, Romanians, Nigerians, and Cubans, as well as Spaniards, aged between 18 and 57, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo reports.
The man who is alleged to have prostituted his own daughter is said to have passed her off as an adult to the clients of the network and the girl herself is said to have had a party at a local bar in the Moroccan city of Tétouan to celebrate her 18th birthday despite actually being 16 at the time.
The teen is said to have been listed on sexually explicit websites to advertise sexual services and the father is believed to have kept all of the cash given to her by those purchasing sex.
A YouTube rapper named Saymol is also one of those 37 people arrested in connection with the network, El Mundo claims. The 21-year-old Dominican national, who has over 150,000 subscribers on YouTube, is accused of luring underage girls for the network to sexually exploit.
The investigation into the exploitation network began last year in April when the Family and Women’s Care Unit (UFAM) of Madrid found a 16-year-old girl was being sold to adults for sex in exchange for money or drugs.
Investigators say that the gang lured the girls through social media networks with promises to make money and taught them to sell drugs as well.
Some of the girls claim to have been sexually abused by drug purchasers after delivering the drugs to them and others were kept in a flat in the Madrid district of Usera where they were offered to drug buyers for sex.
After police had identified all of the members of the network, they conducted raids and arrests on November 30th, discovering and freeing ten minors who had been kept captive by the network who sold them for sex for as little as 50 euros (£41/$56).
During the raids, investigators also found camera equipment that is being analyzed for possible child pornography and found drugs, a firearm, a machete, an undisclosed amount of cash and several electronic devices.
The operation of the gang bears similarity to child grooming gangs in the UK, a years-long problem that is still going on today according to Conservative Party MPs Robbie Moore, Philip Davies, and Lee Anderson.
The three MPs spoke out on the issue in October of last year stating that migrant-heritage men were exploiting children in West Yorkshire.
“Let’s call this problem out for what it is: predominantly a small minority of largely Pakistani Muslim men in West Yorkshire, including, I’m sad to say, in Keighley and across the Bradford district, that have been sexually exploiting young children for far too long,” MP Robbie Moore said.
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