TEHRAN, Oct 20: An Iranian court has jailed some 40 Pakistanis who duped girls, some only 12 years old, into coming to Pakistan, where they were forced to work as prostitutes, a newspaper here said on Sunday.

The Pakistanis presented themselves to poor Iranian families and asked to marry their daughters but then brought the girls to brothels, the Khorasan newspaper said.

“Some of these young girls who managed to escape and return to Iran were in a state of mental and physical trauma,” the judge in the case, Reza Daneshvar Sani, was quoted as saying.

The girls ranged in age from 12 to 20 years, he said. The report did not say for how long those involved had been sentenced to prison.

The judge said that other suspects were granted “Islamic forgiveness” and freed after helping authorities secure the return of some of the girls.

He also called on any other members of the ring to take advantage of an amnesty and turn themselves in.

If they did not, he said, authorities would “publish all the information we have on them in the press and hand their cases over to Interpol.”

Police also arrested eight people, including four members of a family, in a raid on a brothel in Shiraz, the Jam-i-Jam newspaper said.—AFP