The Anti-Human Trafficking Cell says the 26-year-old allegedly used a bar in Wagle Estate to solicit other female performers into commercial sex work.
A prostitution racket operating out of a bar and restaurant in Thane's Wagle Estate has landed a 26-year-old actress in police custody. The Anti-Human Trafficking Cell of the Thane Crime Branch arrested her on Sunday and rescued two other women who investigators say were pushed into the trade.
The actress has appeared in Hindi web series and Bhojpuri films, according to the Free Press Journal, though she has not been named publicly and neither her projects nor her rescued alleged victims have been identified.
Police say the operation began after they got a tip that the woman was planning to bring female artists to the Wagle Estate location for commercial sex work. The AHTC set up a decoy, posing as a customer, to make contact and negotiate a deal. Once she agreed and arrived at the spot with the two women, the waiting team moved in and caught her, in the words of the report, red-handed.
Officers recovered cash and mobile phones from the scene. The two rescued women have been sent to a shelter home for rehabilitation, and a case has been filed at Wagle Estate Police Station under the Prevention of Immoral Traffic Act.
What pushed her into running the operation, per preliminary findings cited by the Free Press Journal, was money trouble and a dry spell of acting work. That's the account so far. Nothing here has been tested in court, and the actress remains an accused, not a convict, under the law.
The bigger question the AHTC is chasing now is who else was involved. Investigators are combing through her phone records and background to map any wider network feeding into the racket, and they're also trying to pin down exactly which shows and films she and the other women worked on, presumably to understand how the industry connection was being used as cover or recruitment.
This isn't the first time Thane's crime branch has flagged the Wagle Estate belt for this kind of activity, and it likely won't be the last given how the area has become a recurring address in such busts. But how far up the chain this particular case goes, and whether more names from the web series or Bhojpuri circuit get pulled in, is still an open file. The Thane Crime Branch hasn't said when the next round of arrests, if any, might come.
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