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SCMP Reporter

ALMOST 800 foreign prostitutes have been arrested in Mongkok in a series of operations police believe has financially crippled the district's sex-for-sale syndicates.

  The prostitutes, mostly from Thailand and the Philippines, were sometimes caught within hours of arriving in the territory.

  The arrests were part of an ambitious operation in Mongkok over the past four months.

  A task force of 40 special duties officers and 30 Organised Crime and Triad Bureau detectives had been assigned to the operation.

  A senior police source said most of the women arrested had been working out of apartment villas where rooms were rented by the hour and the services of prostitutes were brokered by the managers of the apartment complexes.

  All of the women had entered Hong Kong on three-month tourist visas, which prohibit work.

  Once police were able to gain evidence that the women were working as prostitutes, they were handed over to the Immigration Department and repatriated to their home countries.

  The police source said 90 per cent of the women had been arrested during what was known as their ''first tour''.

  ''These women are brought to Hong Kong by syndicates and when their three-month visa expired, they would go to Macau or China for the day so they could get it renewed and start their second tour,'' the source said.

  ''But now we are getting these women before they even get a chance to go into their second tour.''   He said catching the women in their first three-month tour was costing the syndicates heavily.

  ''The syndicates fly to the Philippines or Thailand and go recruiting, so that costs a lot. Then they have to pay for the girls to fly over in batches of up to a dozen - that means more money.

  ''The other cost is that the syndicates usually lend the women money for set-up costs and that is taken out of their pay at the end of their first tour, but we are arresting them and they are sent home before the pimps are paid back.'' 



Dragnet rounds up 800 prostitutes