Four young Russian women have been caught trying to sneak across the Sinai desert border between Egypt and Israel, police said Monday.

Captain Mohammed Badr of North Sinai police said that after their arrest on Sunday the women told their interrogators they had paid thousands of dollars to smugglers to take them into Israel where they planned to find work.

"The smugglers got them to wear garments of the local Bedouin tribes. When police spotted the group, they fired into the air and the smugglers fled, leaving the women near the border's barbed wire fence," Badr said.

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The four women, all in their 20s, had entered Egypt as tourists.

Human traffickers smuggle about 200 people from Egypt into Israel each year, according to the Israeli group Physicians for Human Rights. The U.S. State Department has accused Israel of not doing enough to stop human trafficking.

Egypt and Israel have frequently accused each other of not doing enough to prevent smuggling across their long desert border, which runs from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.

Members of the Bedouin tribes in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula are known to take part in smuggling weapons, drugs and people into Israel and the Gaza Strip.