Bhubaneswar, April 6: The city police have busted a sex racket following the arrest of four persons, including two girls, from a beauty parlour in Chintamaniswar area of Laxmi Sagar last night.

The accused were made to undergo a medical examination at Capital Hospital. The parlour was raided following a tip-off around 9pm yesterday.

“The girls were from Bengal. They had been hired to work in the parlour where sex racket was flourishing. The youths were identified as Matru Prasad Nayak from Kendrapara and Salim Ansari from Bihar,” said a police officer.

Police said Ansari was the owner of the parlour and he owned several other parlours in the city.

The four people were arrested under Section 3 (for allowing a premises to be used as a brothel), 4 (for living on the earnings from prostitution), 5 (procuring, inducing or taking persons for the sake of prostitution), 7 (prostitution in or in the vicinity of public place) and 8 (seducing or soliciting for the purpose of prostitution) of the Immoral Trafficking Prevention Act. While a local court granted the girls bail, the bail pleas of the youths were rejected.

Local residents alleged that the sex racket had been thriving in capital for at least six months now.

“We had sensed that something wrong was going on in that parlour.

“As we were not sure about what was going on, we had not informed the police,” said Kailash Sahu, a trader, who lives near the parlour.

This is not an isolated incident. On December 22 last year, the city police had raided on two houses in Niladri Vihar and Sailashree Vihar in Chandrasekharpur area and arrested 14 persons, including eight women, involved in a sex racket. Sunil Meher, the kingpin of the racket, was also arrested during the raid.

The police also seized a pistol, some live cartridges, two cars and two motorcycles from the spot.

In an earlier interview to The Telegraph, even the police commissioner had admitted that sex trade had increased in the twin cities, particularly in Bhubaneswar.

He had mentioned then that the capital was a city in transition, where values took time to take root.

“A substantial chunk of the migrant population, which comes for employment, education or medical treatment, looks for entertainment and gets involved in such practices,” the commissioner had said.