2 held by police over `gruesome' abortions

Madrid - Spanish police have arrested two men accused of using rusty instruments and gruesome methods to carry out hundreds of…

Madrid - Spanish police have arrested two men accused of using rusty instruments and gruesome methods to carry out hundreds of back-alley abortions on Chinese immigrants working as prostitutes, officials said yesterday.

Police detained two Chinese men and raided four buildings in the centre of Madrid on Tuesday. "The women we found were in such a bad state. It was like something out of a horror film," the head of the police investigation said.

Detectives confiscated thousands of bottles of out-of-date medicine, rusty and unsterilised instruments and medical notes on a thousand women who visited two makeshift abortion clinics. They said the men performed abortions using medicines to make the women haemorrhage, then a household vacuum cleaner to abort the foetuses.