Pimp threatened to kill girl (From Times Series)

Pimp threatened to kill girl

5:08pm Thursday 2nd December 2004 in News

A Kosovan man who forced a teenage girl from Russia to work 12-hour shifts in a Hendon brothel for £10 a day has been jailed for six years.

Niki Dimitrov, 29, threatened the 17-year-old girl with violence unless she worked in London brothels including Paradise in Station Road, Hendon. Dimitrov, who previously escaped deportation from the UK because he claimed he was tortured during the Balkan conflict, is the first person to be prosecuted under section 49 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 for controlling a child prostitute.

The girl, who is from the impoverished central Russian region of Samara, responded to an advert in her local paper last year about jobs in Spain and was told to travel to Belgium. Upon arrival, she was told the job had fallen through and Southwark Crown Court heard how Dimitrov bought' her from associates in Belgium for £3,000.

Dimitrov forced her into prostitution there and, after two months, brought her to London. He gave her a stolen Lithuanian passport which gave her age as 23, and from February until June, made her work in a brothel in Harrow Road, Sudbury, and in Hendon.

Talking through an interpreter, the girl said: "He told me: Don't think about running away because I will find you and kill you even if you are in the Sahara.' He was very aggressive and often beat me up. He was forcing me to have sex with him, and when I said I didn't want to he would beat me up.

"He left me with physical injuries. Once, I wasn't able to work for one-and-a-half weeks because of the visible injuries. He wouldn't just slap me across the face, he would hit me with his fist and punch me. He would kick me too, quite seriously. He didn't even take me to a doctor."

Dimitrov was arrested at his home in Islington in July by police from the Met's clubs and vice unit after a four-week operation codenamed Rusia.

Speaking after Monday's ruling, Superintendent Chris Bradford said: "Dimitrov preyed on a child and treated her as a commodity. She was forced to work in the most unimaginable circumstances whilst he lived a well-funded life. The victim was essentially his prisoner taken from home to a brothel and back again. There is no doubt this girl lived in constant fear from him without hope of escape."

As many as 14,000 girls and young women are thought to have been brought to the UK as sex slaves. A spokeswoman for the Poppy Project, the country's only safehouse for such victims, said the Dimitrov case was a familiar story.

"It is not uncommon for them to be as young as 16 or 17 because, of course, they are the most vulnerable," she said. "The youngest I think we have had is 14."