KEY POINTS:
The London Olympics is being targeted by the criminal gangs behind the multi-billion pound international trade in sex slaves and illegal workers, police have warned.
They fear huge numbers of foreign women could be smuggled into the country to work against their will as prostitutes - meeting demand
from construction workers and then visitors to the 2012 games.
Lucrative building contracts on offer could also lure unscrupulous employers prepared to boost profits by exploiting illegal foreign workers.
Police sounded the warning as the Home Office set out plans to tackle the scourge of "sex trafficking", which is believed to cost Britain £1 billion ($2.75b) a year. An estimated 4000 women are spirited into the country every year, most ending up in prostitution, while others are forced to work for a pittance as domestic slaves or in agriculture.
Unknown numbers of children and illegal workers are also brought into the UK.
Home Secretary John Reid yesterday signed a European convention that gives trafficking victims temporary permission to remain in Britain.
He added his signature to the document using the table on which William Wilberforce and other abolitionists drafted the original anti-slavery laws.
The Home Office also published an action plan for combatting trafficking, training immigration teams at ports, creating a new national system to support victims.
The department said it believed criminal gangs would try to exploit the opportunity of the Olympics by establishing themselves in London before 2012 and disclosed that plans had already been drawn up to put them out of business.
Grahame Maxwell of the Association of Chief Police Officers said: "You will have young men together who earn considerable amounts of money. If they spend that money paying for sex, we must make sure they are aware there are women held against their will."
He said that a Europe-wide crackdown on sexual trafficking based on a successful project last year in Britain will take place from September.
The policeman said the prices paid for sex slaves ranged from £8000 ($22,000) for a 15-year-old virgin - highlighted by a case involving Lithuanian girls - to just £500 ($1380) for a woman forced to work in a restaurant and have sex with co-workers.
Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker said all men who knowingly had sex with a woman who had been trafficked should face rape charges. "Frankly, what else would anybody call it?
"I think if you have got a situation where a man knowingly has sex with a woman who he knows is not freely consenting to that, then I think that that could be considered as rape."
- INDEPENDENT
