Colombo, November 20 (Daily Mirror)- A group of Vietnamese women engaged in running two high end brothels in Colombo by charging up to Rs.35,000 to 50, 000 from their clients were taken into custody by the Department of Immigration and Emigration (DIE) today.

The DIE officials following a lengthy probe raided an apartment in Bambalapitiya and a house in Ward Place where they took nine Vietnamese nationals including seven females into custody.

A senior Immigration official told the Daily Mirror that they learnt about a brothel house carried out in a very secretive manner through social media and used a decoy to gain access to the place in Bambalapitiya.

A male operative of the brothel had even asked for the client’s photograph to be sent online to confirm identity upon arrival. The sleuths took a Vietnamese couple and a single woman from the Bambalapitiya apartment and learnt the whereabouts of the second brothel in Ward Place.

From the Ward Place brothel the sleuths took four Vietnamese women and a couple into custody.

All the foreigners reportedly arrived in Sri Lanka last September on a 30-day tourist visa and had extended them by three months to remain in the country and operate the illicit business.

Preliminary inquiries revealed that the ‘boss’ of the brothels, another Vietnamese male had been operating from Dubai and the arrested group of foreigners had also come from Dubai.

Officials of the DIE Investigation Division are conducting inquiries on the instructions of Controller M. G. V. Kariyawasam and Controller General B.M.D. Nilusha Balasooriya.

The arrested foreigners will be sent to the department’s Detention Centre in Welisara for further inquiries.