A Portuguese man named Fernando José de Jesus Ferreira is in pretrial detention in the Dominican Republic after being arrested by local police for the kidnapping and pimping (promoting prostitution) of four underage girls. The suspect, along with the arrested Dominican woman, allegedly selected and lured the minors in a small town in the north of the Caribbean country, then took them to a house owned by Portuguese men, where they were forced into prostitution.
The couple are serving a three-month pre-trial detention, after which the measure of coercion will be reviewed. The investigation was initiated by the ministry of this country based on evidence collected in a city in the eastern Dominican Republic, where Fernando Ferreira’s house is located. According to local media, this is a tourist area. The defendants forced four minors to accept foreign clients with whom they had sex in exchange for money. The investigation established that the victims were restricted in their movements, and one of them even asked to leave the Portuguese man’s house. She was stopped: the couple assured her that she would leave only if she paid a certain amount of money.
According to investigators, minors received a small percentage of the money paid by clients and even had to pay fines if they were late for sexual encounters.