TEHRAN, Feb 6, 2000 (AFP) - The judiciary on Tuesday said a prostitution ring which smuggled underage girls to Persian Gulf states was uncovered and a number of people arrested, the official IRNA news agency reported.
"The young girls, aged between 13 and 17, were selected before being sent to Arab countries in the Persian Gulf," said Abbasali Alizadeh, head of the Tehran province judiciary cited by IRNA.
Alizadeh, who did not use the term "prostitution", said the girls were chosen from among families in which the parents were either drug addicts or divorced.
He said a number of people had been arrested, but gave no further details on their identities, or on the number of girls involved.
Alizadeh added that the girls were being kept in camera-controlled houses in Tehran.
In January, Iran announced it would no longer issue passports to women who have been expelled from Persian Gulf countries on charges of prostitution.
The measure, taken to clamp down on "professional drug smugglers," was decided after recent mass expulsions of prostitutes from several Persian Gulf countries, the weekly Omid-e Javan said, citing police officials.
Newspapers said that police had also recently closed 29 brothels in Tehran, an unprecedented report in Islamic Iran, where the existence of prostitution had been officially unmentionable.
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