Escorts’ arrested on a night out

BANGALORE: In a dramatic and meticulously-planned sting operation, the police busted a prostitution cell, operating under the guise of escort services, in the city on Friday evening and arrested six persons.The clampdown came after a team of decoys pretending to be foreign delegates hired four ‘escorts’ for their purported trip to Hampi and Mysore. The police said Rashmi (32) ran the cell. Others arrested included a 34-year-old choreographer and four women.A decoy, pretending to be a tour operator, contacted Rashmi for escorts to go with a team of foreign delegates to Hampi after an overnight stay in a resort in the city. On Friday evening, the ‘tour operator’ picked up Rashmi and the escorts from Safina Plaza and Koramangala in a Tata Qualis driven by another decoy. The girls were then taken to the resort where the ‘foreign delegates’ had checked in. Rashmi charged Rs 7,000 a day per ‘escort’ and Rs 2,000 as ‘service charges’. The money was handed over to her after some haggling. Soon after the cash changed hands, the police swooped down on the group. Unaware that the delegates were decoys, Rashmi and gang maintained that they had been invited to the resort “to perform some dance for a birthday party�.When Rashmi realised that they were indeed caught by the police, she pleaded ignorance, saying she came from “a good family�. Her husband is believed to be a small-time businessman. They were booked under the Prevention of Immoral Traffic Act and later taken to Byatarayanapura police station. The ‘escorts’ included a sales executive, a housewife and two dancers from a dance academy in the city.This escort-service front came to light after a similar incident a fortnight ago. A delegation of doctors from the Maldives that had come into the city for recruitment purpose, had allegedly engaged the services of Rashmi’s ‘escorts’ for an evening out in town. Girls aged 17-22, accompanied the doctors to a five-star hotel for dinner and later to a club for some ‘fun’. “The delegates asked us for escorts to accompany them for a social evening,� says Grace, owner of the placement agency responsible for bringing the delegation from the Maldives. “One of the doctors from the city gave us the telephone number of Rashmi who he said would provide us with the escorts.�Though the police claim that ‘services’ of this kind aren’t rampant, a random check on the Web suggests both male and female ‘escorts’ are ‘available’, some for charges ranging from $200-400 per night.