TEHRAN -AFP

http://www.metimes.com/2K2/issue2002-43/women/iranian_police_smash.htm

Police in northeast Iran have arrested 243 members of five "kidnapping, prostitution and murder" networks, with a court sentencing an undisclosed number of the detainees to death, the Entekhab paper reported on Wednesday.

Police in Tehran, meanwhile, shut down a brothel run by a 74-year-old woman who had employed "hundreds of young girls," the paper said.

Also, an Iranian court has jailed some 40 Pakistanis who duped girls, some only 12 years old, into going to Pakistan where they were forced to work as prostitutes, the Khorasan newspaper reported on Sunday.

The Pakistanis presented themselves to poor Iranian families and asked to marry their daughters, the paper said, but then brought the girls to brothels in their home country.

The judge said other suspects were granted "Islamic forgiveness" and freed after helping authorities secure the return of some of the girls.

He also called on any other members of the prostitution ring to take advantage of an amnesty and turn themselves in.

If they did not, he said, authorities would "publish all the information we have on them in the press and hand their cases over to Interpol."

Meanwhile, police also arrested eight people in a raid on a brothel in the southern city of Shiraz, including four members of the same family, the Jame Jam newspaper said on Sunday.