NEW DELHI: Now it’s Baby trafficking — newborns been stolen from hospitals and then being set up for adoption! The Delhi police have busted an illegal adoption racket. Police told newsmen they have broken up an illegal adoption racket in which newborn babies were stolen from hospitals and sold to couples.
The Police have arrested three members of a group operating a fake charity in New Delhi . This organisation, police claim, has allegedly sold two dozen babies and toddlers to couples for up to Rs 5,50,000 rupees per child. It was a ‘sophisticated racket’.
“The children were either stolen at birth, (or later) kidnapped or bought from poor parents,” Dependra Pathak, joint commissioner for southwest Delhi, declared. So far they have confessed to selling 24 babies,” he added.
The police were pursuing the case for some months, and laid a trap for the traffickers. Undercover officers posed as a couple seeking to adopt, he said. Two children were rescued at the fake charity’s offices during a raid on Monday following a sting operation and the three arrested have been remanded into police custody for further questioning.
The racket in Delhi involved prospective adoptive mothers being admitted to private clinics where they were given a false record of having delivered a baby as well as a birth certificate for their “newborns”, Pathak said. Such underhand ruses are encouraged because couples wanting to legally adopt in India are often frustrated by lengthy bureaucratic delays and complex rules.
It is no wonder the illegal adoption market is thriving, with babies and children abandoned by their families given straight to prospective parents. Desperately poor parents also sell their children, while others are kidnapped by traffickers, experts say.
In order to reunite some of these trafficked infants with their birth parents, the Delhi police are seeking assistance from other states from where the babies and children were apparently trafficked.
India has an estimated 30 million orphans. But only 4,354 children were legally adopted in 2013 and 2,500 in 2014, according to the government’s central adoption resource authority.
Kidnapping and trafficking children in India has long been a major problem, with many sold to unscrupulous employers for use as cheap labour.
[rewritten by Newsnet Desk]
Capital Cops bust Baby burglar business added by editor1 on
View all posts by editor1 →