Police in eastern India have rescued 13 babies and discovered the skeletons of two infants in raids on homes for the elderly and mentally disabled, as a probe into a suspected international human trafficking ring widened on Monday.
Ten infants, all aged under one, were found on Friday last week at a home for the mentally disabled run by a charity in the impoverished district of South 24 Parganas in West Bengal, while in another raid in the neighboring district of North 24 Parganas, the remains of two infants were found in office premises of a charity which runs an adoption center.
The raids come after the discovery of three newborn babies on Monday last week hidden inside cardboard biscuit boxes in a locked storeroom at a nursing home, where women would come to deliver or have an abortion.
Rajesh Kumar of West Bengal’s Crime Investigation Department said 18 people had been arrested for taking the newborn babies and trafficking them for adoption in India and overseas.
“It is a huge network of NGOs [non-governmental organizations], nursing homes, doctors and middlemen dealing in illegal adoption and baby trafficking that the police have busted. Our men are now building on the huge leads they have already got in this case,” Kumar said on Monday.
Initial investigations revealed that unmarried girls and women who visited the clinics for an abortion were persuaded by staff to give birth and sell their babies.
The police did not give a price, but local news reports said the mothers were given 300,000 rupees (US$4,380) for a boy and 100,000 rupees for a girl.
Babies were also stolen from women who delivered at the clinics, but who were told by staff their children were stillborn. Some were even given the bodies of stillborn babies preserved by the clinics to dupe parents, police said.
The babies were then smuggled in biscuit containers to adoption centers, homes for the mentally disabled and elderly people, where they were kept until their adoption was organized.
Those arrested included the owners of the clinics, midwives, doctors, owners of the charities, as well as court clerks, who are accused of forging documentation for the babies.
South Asia is one of the fastest-growing regions for human trafficking in the world.
Gangs sell thousands of victims into bonded labor every year or hire them out to exploitative bosses as domestic servants, or to sectors such as farming and manufacturing. Many women and girls are sold into brothels.
Kumar said one of the doctors arrested on suspicion of involvement in the baby smuggling racket had more than US$3,200 in US dollars, euros and Hong Kong dollars in his possession, suggesting the infants were being sold overseas.
“The seizure of this foreign currency is a definite indication that the racket may have its tentacles spread into foreign countries and foreign couples who were interested in baby adoption,” he said.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
Japan is to downgrade its description of ties with China from “one of its most important” in an annual diplomatic report, according to a draft reviewed by Reuters, as relations with Beijing worsen. This year’s Diplomatic Bluebook, which Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government is expected to approve next month, would instead describe China as an important neighbor and the relationship as “strategic” and “mutually beneficial.” The draft cites a series of confrontations with Beijing over the past year, including export controls on rare earths, radar lock-ons targeting Japanese military aircraft and increased pressure around Taiwan. The shift in tone underscores a deterioration
A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America. Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit. It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations
Germany is considering Australia’s Ghost Bat robot fighter as it looks to select a combat drone to modernize its air force, German Minister of Defense Boris Pistorius said yesterday. Germany has said it wants to field hundreds of uncrewed fighter jets by 2029, and would make a decision soon as it considers a range of German, European and US projects developing so-called “collaborative combat aircraft.” Australia has said it will integrate the Ghost Bat, jointly developed by Boeing Australia and the Royal Australian Air Force, into its military after a successful weapons test last year. After inspecting the Ghost Bat in Queensland yesterday,
RSS