A 27-year-old man from Gujarat, India, has been sentenced to ten years in prison in the United States after he paid sex traffickers to abuse a teenage girl at the hotel where he worked.
Kavankumar Patel worked at the AmericInn hotel in Omaha, Nebraska. He told the court that he used money from the hotel’s cash till to pay traffickers to have sex with a 15-year-old girl.
The case was uncovered on 6 January 2025, when Omaha police went to the hotel after receiving a theft complaint. Once there, they found signs of sex trafficking. Officers from the Homeland Security Task Force and the Omaha Police Department then rescued two girls, aged 15 and 16. The girls had been brought to the hotel from another state by traffickers who were selling them for sex.
The US Attorney’s Office in Nebraska described the terrible conditions the girls had been living in. “The two minor females reported that their traffickers had instructed that the minors must engage in sex with hotel staff for a reduced room rate or they would be kicked out of the hotel," the office said.
Three hotel staff members were involved in the abuse. Two of them, including Patel, paid the traffickers to access one of the girls. A third employee abused the other girl without making any payment. After this, all three employees allowed the traffickers and the girls to keep staying at the hotel for several more days.
The girls told investigators they had barely any food and felt they had no way out. While they were being held at the hotel, the traffickers kept posting adverts online to arrange more sex acts involving the teenagers.
Patel admitted that the money he paid to the traffickers came directly from the hotel’s cash drawer.
United States Attorney Lesley Woods welcomed the sentence. “The Homeland Security Task Force rescued these children from a living nightmare," she said.
