Police in Athens have arrested four suspected members of an Albanian sex-trafficking gang that is believed to have also devoted considerable energy to burglaries and shoplifting.

In a raid on a flat rented by the suspects in the central Athens district of Ambelokipi, police found a young Albanian woman whom the gang had allegedly held captive and forced to have sex with paying customers. Police said gang members had forced the girl to take drugs, in order to make her more compliant.

The four Albanian men, whose arrest was announced yesterday, were charged with human trafficking, procuring, breaches of the law on organized crime, repeated theft, money-laundering, drugs and arms offenses. Their names were not made public.

The raid also netted what police described as a large number of electrical appliances, kitchenware and items believed to have been stolen from grocers’ shops, as well as two pistols, ammunition and burglars’ tools.