Inside the Chinese dungeon where father secretly kept six women as ‘sex slaves' and forced them to fight to death

December 04, 2012 10:25AM
       
THE gruesome set up of the basement dungeon where a married father secretly held six women as sex slaves has been revealed.

Li Hao, 35, from Henan province, was sentenced to death last week for keeping the women in his grim tiny cellar and for his role in the murder of two of them.

The local government clerk was convicted on charges including murder, rape, organised prostitution and illegal detention, state-run media outlet Xinhua has reported.

A court heard how he built a dungeon in his basement where he forced the women to work as prostitutes.

Police were quoted as saying that Li coerced them to kill two others who had been forced to work as sex slaves alongside them.

Three of the women he held were given leniency for their role in the two murders.

One received three years and the two others were put on probation, according to Xinhua.

Eventually, one of the women managed to escape and she went to the police.

An investigation revealed that Li created the basement in 2009 and held the women for between two to 21 months.

During their incarceration he repeatedly raped them, forced them to have sex with other men for money and made them perform in pornographic web shows.

Before they were tricked into going to Li's dungeon, the women had all worked at nightclubs and karaoke bars.

Two of the six were found dead when a 23-year-old woman who had been kept for three months escaped while being taken out to work as a prostitute in September last year - she led police to the basement.

A lawyer in Changsha who was following the case said Li's death sentence was predictable, but she could not agree with the verdicts for the three women.

'I was shocked when hearing of their verdicts because they were victims in this sex-slave scandal,' Zhang Yan told the South China Morning Post.

She had attempted to represent the women in court but says she had been refused by local authorities.

She said information released by the police indicated that all the women had suffered inconceivable mental and physical torture.

China Central Television reported earlier that Li had lured them back to his underground lair after offering to pay them for sex if they went home with him. Instead he held them captive.

The court said Li was working as a clerk for Luoyang's technology supervision bureau when he was arrested in September last year. He was married and had an eight-month-old son, Xinhua reported.

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