A Finnish man in his 40s is suspected of human trafficking and pimping in Latvia.

   

The man is believed to have organised a circle of dozens of women from Latvia, Estonia, and Russia to work as prostitutes in several large Finnish cities. He was taken into custody in Latvia at the beginning of February.

The National Bureau of Investigation's

Tampere unit and the Finnish Frontier Guard have recently revealed the organization that the Finnish man was allegedly in charge of. Two Latvian women and a Latvian man were also involved in the same case, and are currently being held in custody in Latvia.

   

Human trafficking is not often encountered in the Nordic countries and for the time being the Finnish penal code has no reference to this issue. However, this fault will be corrected soon.

The charges against the man

will be heard shortly and if found guilty he will be sentenced under Latvian law. Any sentence is expected to be rather heavy - particularly as it is suspected that some kind of pressure was used and an international criminal organization was involved, and because one of the women was a minor aged 17.

   

It is alleged that the organization started its operations a year ago, and that it followed the pattern familiar in other similar crimes recently. A switchboard in Tallinn was run by mainly Estonian women, but the customers' calls to the mobile numbers there were handled in Finnish. After concluding business with one customer, the prostitute informed the centre that she was available again.

A strange matter was discovered

during the investigations: some videocams had been hidden in the flats at least in Oulu, Jyväskylä and Kuopio. The cameras transmitted pictures to the centre of operations' computer via GSM. Some of the images were saved into the computer's memory.

   

Evidently, the purpose was not to blackmail the clients later, but to control the prostitutes so that they would not receive customers on their own account. Hence all the money would come to the organization.

   

The Finnish police

have not yet seen the video material, but reportedly the quality of the pictures is good.

   

According to Det. Inspector Jari Räty, the estimated number of Finnish male customers was some thousands. The profit made by the organization was about EUR 150,000 to 200,000.

   

The organization is said to have run the business from February 2003 to the end of January 2004 in rental flats in Kuopio, Turku, Rovaniemi, Mikkeli, Helsinki, Jyväskylä and Oulu. Altogether around 30 women were involved in the operation.

The main suspect

may also be prosecuted for another similar crime involving an operation that was supervised from Oulu while the prostitutes were working in 15 cities all over Finland. In the preliminary investigation the estimated revenue from the business was over EUR 1 million.