Pune, Sep 22 (IANS): Blowing off a human-trafficking racket, the Pune Police have nabbed a Karnataka man from Mumbai for allegedly 'selling' off two Pune women for Rs 4 lakh each in Saudi Arabia, an official said here on Friday.

The accused, identified as M. Faiyyaz A. Yahya, who hails from Bengaluru, was caught from his residence in Oshiwara suburb and whisked off to Pune.

"We have arrested the accused on Thursday and he was produced before a Pune Court which remanded him to police custody till September 26," the Investigating

Officer PSI Yuvraj Shinde of Marketyard Police Station, told IANS.

Besides Yahya, 28, at least five of his associates Abdul Hamid Shaikh, Hakim, and three women Nasreen, Rahim and Shamima are still absconding.

The police teams have also scoured their workplace A. A. Enterprises, said to be a 'recruitment' firm for menial jobs based in Mahim, south Mumbai, said Shinde.

Giving the case details, Shinde said that Yahya and his accomplices lured poor women from different cities on the pretext of getting them lucrative jobs as house-maids for big affluent families in Saudi Arabia with a monthly salary of at least Rs 35,000 per month.

However, when the two victims – both from Ambedkar Nagar in Marketyard area of Pune – landed there on tourist visas and started working, they got paid much less than the promised salary and allegedly subjected to other forms of torture by their employers.

Unable to take it, the harassed women contacted the local (Saudi Arabia) agents to complain, but instead they demanded that the women cough out Rs 4 lakh each before they could go home to India.

"The local contacts informed the two victims that they were ‘sold’ to them by Yahya and others for Rs 4 lakh each, and until their money was returned, they would not be allowed to return to India," said Shinde.

Somehow, the women managed to return to Pune and lodged the complaint with Marketyard Police Station and the Social Security Cell on Monday, after which they swung into action.

The police are probing the tentacles of this racket, checking how many more gullible women have been similarly trapped by the human-trafficking gangs,

which other countries they are operating, etc.

Yahya has been charged under various sections of the Indian Penal Code pertaining to common intention, buying or selling a person as a slave, extortion, cheating, etc.