The policemen saw that the man in the luxury car was having sex with a girl - and it took R1 000 for them to look the other way.

Amid shocking claims this week of police extortion by Hillbrow street children, Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Billy Downer has said that police allegedly repeatedly caught a suspected German paedophile sexually abusing girls as young as 13 in his car, but did nothing to stop him.

This comes within days of a report by sex workers rights group Sweat, in which 48 adult sex workers claimed they had been beaten up, sprayed with pepper spray, raped and forced to pay "fines" of between R50 to R500 and more to avoid arrest.

In some incidents, the sex workers' clients also had to pay bribes ranging from R300 and R1 000, with those who refused to pay being "threatened with arrest or that their wives would be called".

And it appears that children caught up in the sex industry suffer the same fate as their adult counterparts.

In the state's application to seize accused German paedophile Werner Braun's plush Helderberg Estate, Cape Town, home and luxury car, which was scheduled to be heard in the Cape High Court on Tuesday and then postponed to August, two of the man's alleged victims detailed how Macassar police had found Braun having sex with them.

"The police - their names were Richard, Ninja and Boy - often caught me and Jack (the name by which they called Braun) on the beach. They didn't actually want to catch Jack. They blackmailed him. He then gave them a thousand odd. They said to him they would phone his wife. Then he gave them the money. They would let him get out of the car and pretend they wanted to catch him," one child stated in a statement before the Cape High Court.

According to another child: "He was busy having sex with me when the police caught us there. The police wanted to lock him up. Jack was scared. He begged the police (it was just one policeman) not to lock us up and he gave the policeman R400. The policeman waited until we drove away. Jack then dropped me off.

Now, as three policemen face corruption charges stemming from the alleged abuse incidents in Cape Town, the authorities face tough questions about the extortion of children as young as nine who are forced to sell their bodies on the streets of Hillbrow.

These children are given R30 to have sex with adults, but claim that police demanded 10 times that amount not to arrest them.

"Sometimes they pick us up and drive with us for a while, and then they say they will put us in the cells with the killers if we don't give them money.

"They know when we have money because they watch us. They know when we get into nice cars," a teenage streetchild told The Star.

The children claimed they were often placed in police cells with adults when, after being beaten up or raped by "clients", they were discovered by police.

The situation has prompted the Rahab Centre in Hillbrow to renovate a planned "crisis centre" in Smit Street, where about 12 sick or injured children can be accommodated for the night while awaiting medical attention.

Leslie Xinwa, acting executive director of the Independent Complaints Directorate, on Tuesday told The Star that, to the best of his knowledge, the police watchdog had not received any recent complaints about police abuse or extortion of child sex workers.

The ICD investigated seven Johannesburg police officers two years ago, after SABC's Special Assignment captured the officials soliciting bribes from sex workers and their clients in Rosebank and Bramley.

The officers were shown threatening sex workers and their clients with arrest unless they paid a "spot fine" of between R600 and R1 000. Some sex workers claimed they had also been forced to hand over their fridges and television sets to avoid arrest.

But attempts to charge the officers with corruption and extortion were not successful. It remains unclear whether they were dismissed from their positions.