Turkish military police said on Thursday that they had stormed an Istanbul villa to rescue nine captive women whose scantily clad images were posted online after they were recruited for a TV reality show.
Pictures of the women posing in bathing suits and exercising were distributed on a Turkish-language Web site that allowed users to vote for their favorite woman and see more images by charging money through their mobile phones.
The women soon realized they had been duped, and asked to leave the villa, local media said.
The women were rescued on Monday in the villa in Riva, a resort near Istanbul, a military police spokesman said.
Hilmi Tufan Cakir, a lawyer representing the show’s organizers, said the show was legitimate.
“They knew that this competition would be aired on the Internet live,” he said.
The women were made to sign a contract that said they could have no contact with their families and would have to pay a 50,000 Turkish Lira (US$33,000) fine if they left the show within two months, Dogan news agency reported.
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
Russia and Ukraine have exchanged prisoners of war in the latest such swap that saw the release of hundreds of captives and was brokered with the help of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), officials said on Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that 189 Ukrainian prisoners, including military personnel, border guards and national guards — along with two civilians — were freed. He thanked the UAE for helping negotiate the exchange. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that 150 Russian troops were freed from captivity as part of the exchange in which each side released 150 people. The reason for the discrepancy in numbers
The foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland on Tuesday expressed concern about “the political crisis” in Georgia, two days after Mikheil Kavelashvili was formally inaugurated as president of the South Caucasus nation, cementing the ruling party’s grip in what the opposition calls a blow to the country’s EU aspirations and a victory for former imperial ruler Russia. “We strongly condemn last week’s violence against peaceful protesters, media and opposition leaders, and recall Georgian authorities’ responsibility to respect human rights and protect fundamental freedoms, including the freedom to assembly and media freedom,” the three ministers wrote in a joint statement. In reaction
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