ONE of the victims of in the car wash modern slavery case said he was 'treated like a piece of garbage'.

Sitar Ali, 33, of Adelaide Street, Carlisle, and Defrim Paci, 42, of Windmill Close, Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottingham, were both jailed yesterday after exploiting Romanian nationals through forced labour at Shiny car wash, Warwick Road, Carlisle.

The following statements are taken from three of the victims identified as part of a police investigation into a criminal enterprise.

There were four victims in this investigation all Romanian men. They were aged 49, 34, 32 and 21 at the time of the offences.

Victims in modern slavery offences have anonymity, similar to victims of sexual offences.

Victim two

The experience I went through while working at the car wash in Carlisle caused me to lose all trust in humans. I was treated like a piece of garbage by those running the place and this caused me extreme stress there and long-term anxiety afterwards. I often relive in front of my eyes the horrible episode and the cruel manner in which Sitar and Defrim treated me and everyone else working at the car wash.

I haven’t been able to travel to Romania in the last six years following the incident, and this has affected very much my relationship with my family.

I am humiliated by what happened to me and I am ashamed to show my face in the small community, a village, where I come from.

Because of needing to move from one safe house to another several times during the last four years, I have lost touch with the very few people I had a close relationship with and currently I am not it touch with any one of them. My social life is completely inexistent.

Victim two

The episode I experienced at the Carlisle car wash has been the most horrible experience I have been through in my entire life, and I do not wish it upon anyone to go through anything similar. It is a terrible injustice for a human being to take advantage of another human by exploiting them. This is what happened to me in Carlisle.

For almost two years, as I belatedly found out. I was paid less than half the minimum wage despite working hard for 12 hours every day. The accommodation available was squalid.

It fills me with anger when I think back to what I went through at the Carlisle car wash. The priorities of the car wash owners were to keep us in ignorance, fully unaware of our legal rights in order for them to be able to exploit us.

Victim three

Even though I only worked at the Carlisle car wash for only nine days, the shock of this experience will stay with me for life. I moved to the UK to offer my family a better life. I had previously worked in Spain and I expected the working conditions in UK to be similar. The fact that from my first day I started to be treated like a beast of burden not being allowed any breaks, while the owners treated us as slaves, made me upset and caused me to worry for my family. The squalid conditions that I was forced to live in added further stress to the whole experience.

Whenever I find myself thinking back to the things I went through I am overcome by extreme panic. The inhumane manner in which Sitar and Defrim treated those that worked for them will forever stay with me and has caused me to lose trust in people.

Fortunately, my life has changed for the better as a result of this incident because now I live a decent house and I have a job that gives me lots of satisfaction. My brother lives next door from me and we both now have young children.