A Boston doctor involved in a sex trafficking incident was arrested by federal officers who pretended to be selling teenage girls for sex.
Dr. Sadeq Quraishi, 45, worked at the Tufts Medical Center as an anesthesiologist and was arrested on Wednesday at a Boston Hotel after allegedly agreeing to pay an undercover police officer $250 to have sex with an underage girl.
The Tufts Medical Center initially suspended the doctor and placed him on compulsory leave after they learned about the unfortunate allegations against him. They issued a statement on Friday announcing that they had fired him.
According to a court document written by an agent working for the US Homeland Security Investigations, events leading up to his arrest started when he responded to an online advertisement. The ad showed two young girls, apparently “beautiful flowers ready to bloom.”
The advertisement, placed on a website that is well known for advertising commercial sex work, listed the two girls as 18-year-olds and said that they were traveling through town as they were on a little road trip.
Dr. Quraishi sent a text message to the number provided in the ad. An undercover officer told him they only had a 12-year-old girl and another 14-year-old girl available for sex in exchange for some money.
The affidavit included several pages of Dr. Quraishi and the undercover agent exchanging text messages. In some of the messages, Dr. Quraishi asked the agent if he was a police officer or a serial killer. Dr. Quraishi told the agent that he did not want to get arrested.
In several messages, Dr. Quraishi seemed to be fighting with his conscience about whether he should have sex with such young girls. He asked the agent if they might have been over 16 years but only looked very young, to which the agent replied that the girls were 12 and 14.
After a long exchange, the doctor finally agreed to pay $250 to have sex with one of them. He went to the agreed hotel and paid the cash to another undercover agent in exchange for the room’s keycard.
The police arrested him shortly after that exchange, and agents confirmed that he had carried the phone with the text message exchange.
During an interview with authorities, Dr. Quraishi told the officers that this was not the first time he had purchased sex.
According to the US Justice Department, Dr. Quraishi is among four men arrested in the sex trafficking ring operation. The other three men included Dmitri McKenzie, 27, David Cannon, 59, and Fabian Medina, 37. They were all arrested for paying to have sex with the imaginary 12 and 14-year-olds.
Just like Dr. Quraishi, they all responded to the same advertisement about the girls, and although the agent informed them that the girls were only 12 and 14, they did not back down. They all agreed to pay to have sex with either of them.
They all went to the hotel, where they paid for the sexual encounters before federal agents arrested them.
Dr. Quraishi and the three other men face minimum sentences of 10 or 15 years of imprisonment.
