RUSSIA: Two teenage girls who were drugged at a disco in southern Russia spent three and a half years as sex slaves in a basement before being freed, police revealed yesterday.
Irina Sablina, a senior prosecutor in Ryazan region, about 120 miles south of Moscow, said the pair, now 21 and 17, were freed from the basement in the small town of Skopin on Monday after their captor, a 53-year-old factory worker, was detained by police.
One of the women is pregnant and has already given birth to two sons in the past three years, both of whom are believed to be in local orphanages.
The teenagers were kidnapped after meeting their captor at a disco on September 30th, 2000, where he slipped Dimedrol, an antihistamine with a sedative effect, into their drinks, Interfax news agency reported.
After being drugged, they awoke in the basement where they spent the next three years and eight months, seeing no one but the kidnapper.
They were raped, beaten and deprived of food, though later their treatment improved and they were given a small hotplate for cooking.
A year after their disappearance, police opened an investigation into their assumed deaths.
"They had no idea of where they were," Ms Sablina said.
At one point, they tried to get a message out by slipping a note into the second baby's clothes before he was taken to an orphanage. But the note was found.