MANILA: Twenty young Filipina girls have been rescued from a Manila house where they were locked up by a human trafficking syndicate, police said on Sunday.

The girls, who all came from impoverished southern Philippine villages and had been lured by the promise of jobs abroad, were found after a raid on the house owned by the crime gang on Saturday, police said. The raid came after a member of the gang was arrested at Manila airport while trying to send off five other girls using fake passports to clients in the Middle East, said police Superintendent Alfred Corpus.

The girls told police that many of them had been locked up in the gang’s house for weeks on end while fake documents for them were prepared. There are an estimated eight million Filipino workers overseas, many of them undocumented and travelled abroad using fake documents for a chance to earn as little as $200 a month under sometimes dire circumstances.—AFP