I was sold as a slave for £3500... in Scotland
Victim of barbaric human traffickers reveals ordeal
Avictim of ruthless slave traders has revealed how she was tricked into travelling to Scotland before being sold as a bride.
Adriana Adiova spoke to The Sunday Post after escaping her life of slavery and returning to her home town in eastern Slovakia. She broke her silence to reveal how she had been duped into travelling to Scotland with her younger sister after being promised a job on a farm.
“But when we arrived there was no work. We had no work and no money,” she said. Adriana told how she was taken to a flat and sold to a Pakistani man who wanted to buy a wife for his son to secure him an EU passport.
The gang was initially paid £3,500 then another £900 before Adriana was taken to Ireland to be married. She broke her silence as four of the people traffickers behind her slavery face jail after being convicted in Glasgow.
Adriana said: “I did not love my husband. I did not even know him. I was forced to get married. I was told I must and I was afraid. I regret everything.”
Ahuman trafficking victim tricked into moving to Scotland before being sold as a bride has spoken of her ordeal for the first time.
Adriana Adiova has returned to her home town in eastern Slovakia where she was first approached by a woman who promised farm work in Britain.
She spoke to The Sunday Post there after four of the people traffickers behind her slavery were convicted in Glasgow.
Adriana was one of many women trafficked from Slovakia to Glasgow to be sold as brides or into prostitution. One victim was sold for £ 10,000 outside the Primark store in the city’s Argyle Street.
She said the offer of work in Britain seemed an opportunity to escape the abject poverty of her home among the 3,000- strong Roma community in the town of Trebisov.
But her dream of a better life turned to a nightmare which saw her trafficked, sold on for about £ 5,000, unsure even which country which she was living in.
Speaking at her basement room in Trebisov, Adriana, 28, said she was first contacted by a woman from a neighbouring town near the border with Ukraine offering work in Britain.
She said: “She told me she had work for me and my sister. I was 21 and my sister 18.
“I was afraid of what might happen if my sister went on her own so I agreed to go too. I wanted to take care of her in a foreign land.
“We went by bus, five hours to Bratislava and then by plane to Glasgow. We liked the trip to Britain because we flew by plane. That was the first time we had ever flown.
“We were supposed to work on a potato farm and were told there would be money and designer clothes for us. But when we arrived there was no work for us. We realised it was fake offer and there was no job. Within two weeks I had no money and no work.”
The fixer in her trafficking case was a woman who, Adriana said, she understood was a cousin of Vojtech Gom bar, a 61- year-old Slovak national who lived in a flat in Allison Street in Glasgow’s Govanhill.
Gombar was one of four people convicted of people trafficking at the High Court in Glasgow on Friday.
Adriana said: “We stayed in Glasgow, although I thought it was London. When I realised there was no work, the woman who had arranged for us to come said she had another ‘job’, which was a wedding.”
Adriana said she was staying in her flat in Govanhill where 10 people lived at the time and that she slept on a shared sofa.
After a fortnight, she was sent with another woman to Gombar’s home where there were two other Pakistani men waiting. She said she was told one of them wanted a bride for his son and wanted to choose “the older one”, which was her.
The buyers, mainly men from Pakistan, were seeking EU citizenship so they could live and work in Europe.
Adriana married a 23- yearold Pakistani man in a ceremony in Ireland in June 2012, at the Westcourt Hotel in Drogheda, County Meath. The wedding was conducted by a local registrar. It’s understood he had family connections in Ireland.
Adriana and her “husband” were listed at the time as
I was taken to a flat and told the man there wanted to buy a wife for his son. I was sold to him for £3,500 – Trafficking victim Adriana Adiova
living in a residential house in Johnstown, Navan, about 20 miles west of Drogheda. Neighbours said last week the family had moved on shortly after the date of the wedding.
Adriana said: “I was sold to a Pakistani man in Glasgow and we flew to Dublin to marry. He bought me two dresses for my wedding, one red and one white.
“He gave me € 500 before and € 500 after the wedding ( about £ 900 in total). After, we lived in separated rooms and could only communicate by gestures, although later he taught me with the computer to speak English.
“The woman told me she got € 4,000 ( about £ 3,500) for selling me and later another € 1,000, which I saw with my eyes as the money was lying on the table.”
Adriana spent nine months living with her new husband back in Scotland before deciding she could take no more.
She missed her real family and even the desperate poverty of Trebisov was preferable to her miserable existence in Glasgow.
She said: “After a while I said that I wanted to see my sister. The Pakistani man who was my husband called and arranged the meeting with my sister who, at that time, lived in Cicova [ in the Czech Republic].
“I then decided I wanted to go home because I had no job, no money and I didn’t speak English. What else should I have done?
“My fake husband bought me everything,” she said. “The conditions were better there in Glasgow than in Trebisov but I wanted to leave.”
She said her “husband” didn’t want to let her go, so she contacted her brother in Trebisov to come to take her home. He was unsure about making the trip, but Adriana managed to send a little money to help pay for his travel to Glasgow.
She said: “I did not love my husband and I did not even know him. I was forced to get married. What else could I have done without money? I was told I must get married and I was afraid.
“I wished to go home but there was a problem. I had not got enough money and couldn’t buy tickets. I called my brother who came to free me after a week. When he came, I was able to leave Glasgow. The man I was married to wasn’t cruel to me. I just wanted to leave.”
Adriana went home to Trebisov where she still lives in a room she bought for £ 90 in the “ghetto” at the southern tip of the town among members of the Roma community.
She said: “I didn’t say to police what happened at the time but they contacted me after a while. So I told them my story.”
She gave evidence to the High Court in Glasgow last month via video link from a Slovakian court in Humenne, about 30 miles from Trebisov.
She was one of 14 women named on court papers in a lengthy list of trafficking charges against Gombar and three co-accused.
Adriana said: “I regret everything. I just had money to buy a flat and I now have a child of my own and I look after another child. I still suffer the consequences from what happened in Scotland. I cannot marry a man here as I am still married to the Pakistani man.
“It bothers me because I would want to get married to a man from my Roma community and get on with my life. I was poor before and I am poor today also.”