Telangana Police on Tuesday arrested eight people for allegedly trafficking minors, during a raid on a brothel in Yadagirigutta town, The News Minute reported. The police said they rescued 11 girls, four of them below seven, during a raid they conducted based on a tip-off.

A doctor was allegedly injecting the minor girls with hormones to hasten their growth and enable the traffickers to push them into the sex trade, the police told reporters. “The traffickers bought the children, all from poor families, through agents, by paying them between Rs 1 lakh to Rs 2 lakh for each girl,” NDTV quoted senior police officer Mahesh M Bhagwat as saying.

The accused have been identified as Kamsani Kalyani, Kamsani Anitha, Kamsani Susheela, Kamsani Narsimha, Kamsani Sruthi, Kamsani Saritha, Kamsani Vani, Kamsani Vamshi and Dr Swamy.

The police said some of the accused were repeat offenders who had earlier been booked under the Preventive Detention Act.

Bhongir Deputy Commissioner of Police E Ramachandra Reddy said that the accused were running the racket for over ten years, The News Minute reported. “We are yet to establish when they began administering the minors hormonal injections,” Reddy said. “The doctor is absconding.”

Reddy said the accused enrolled the minors in schools which were lax about background checks and procured documents claiming that they were their parents. “Once they got it on the record of the school certificate that they were the minor’s parents, they would attempt to get other fake certificates like Aadhaar card,” Reddy said. “So even when the police raided them, they claimed that the girls were their children and showed these invalid certificates.”