Jyoti Weststrate and Regina Schipper have been looking for their biological parents in India for years. Correspondent Aletta André followed part of their search.

Aletta André18 January 2023, 01:00

A middle-aged woman is standing in Jyoti Weststrate's hotel room with some relatives. It is a cheap four-storey hotel in the town of Bettiah in the northern Indian state of Bihar. The music of a wedding in the courtyard can be heard through the window.

The woman looks awkward and confused, and after a while drops off. "It doesn't get through to them, but I'm not who they're looking for," says Weststrate, unsure how to deal with the situation. In her own search for her biological family, she is used to some disappointment. The fact that she also sees the other side of the coin in Bihar, with families of missing children, touches her, but does not take her any further.

'I don't want to die searching'

This is Part 2 of a four-part investigative series. Read Part 1 here.

Content Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of child sexual abuse. Reader discretion is advised.

Part 1 of the Zulock saga covered how gay activists William Dale Zulock Jr. and Zachary "Zack" Jacoby Zulock, the adoptive fathers of two boys, have been indicted by a grand jury on a slew of felony child sex charges, including prostitution of a minor.

Count 16 and Count 17 of the indictment charges the Zulock couple with soliciting 27-year-old Hunter Clay Lawless and 25-year-old Luis Armando Vizcarro-Sanchez, both of Loganville, to engage in "an act of prostitution" with their 11-year-old adopted boy.

Co-Conspirators

TRAFFICKING in persons, or human trafficking, thrives rapidly due to the growing usage of social media and desperation to increase financial stability in the post-pandemic age we live in.

This crime has been defined under Article 3 of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children 2000 (Trafficking Protocol 2000), which requires three main elements.

Firstly, an act by the traffickers is required. This can be seen through their method to bring vulnerable persons to their preferred location either by recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons.

Secondly, there must be a means to be trafficked. In this regard, the traffickers may use coercion, abduction, deception, giving or receiving of payments, or benefits, to achieve the consent of a person for bringing them to their preferred location.

Thirdly, the purpose of such an act must be for the exploitation of the person involved.

WAS STOLEN: Camilla Austbø was stolen from her family in Ecuador and adopted to Norway. Photo: Espen Rasmussen / VG

The Norwegian authorities would not say that Camilla’s adoption was illegal. Nevertheless, the Ministry of Children and Families paid for trips to Ecuador, psychological help and telephone bills for Camilla and her adoptive family.

VG told Saturday the story of Camilla Austbø (37) from Skien.

She was abducted from her home in Ecuador at the age of three. Then she was bought, sold and adopted to Norway.

The biological mother in Ecuador demanded that the adoption be annulled – so that she could get her daughter back.

EXPOSED SCANDAL: Farith Simon helped reveal that Ecuadorian children were adopted out of the country illegally in 1989. Photo: Espen Rasmussen / VG

QUITO (VG) Norwegian actors paid money to Ecuador. Then the demand to get a stolen child back disappeared. – An attempt to bury one’s own conscience, says the Ecuadorian lawyer.

Published:

Less than 20 minutes ago

As VG could reveal on Saturday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Norwegian association Adoption Forum gave a large sum of money to a human rights organization in Ecuador in the 90s.

This is Part 1 of a four-part investigative series.

Content Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of child sexual abuse. Reader discretion is advised.

A months-long Townhall investigation reveals disturbing new details about the affluent LGBTQ-activist couple accused of sodomizing their young adopted sons—now ages 9 and 11—and distributing "homemade" child pornography of the sexual abuse. Half a year after the shocking story made national news, Townhall is the only outlet following up on the criminal case in Georgia that has since seen zero headlines written about it. We've found that it's far, far worse than what was first reported.

Not only did the married men allegedly rape the two boys who were adopted through a Christian special-needs adoption agency, they were pimping out their children to nearby pedophiles in Atlanta-area suburbs, Townhall's follow-up investigation discovered.

Recorded jailhouse calls, a trove of never-before-seen court documents, and testimony from a family member who spoke exclusively with Townhall uncover the extent of the physical and emotional trauma the two elementary school-aged brothers endured as well as the red flags that the state overlooked during the same-sex couple's "faster than expected" adoption process.

After the 1976 coup, the military brutally crushed its opponents. At least 500 babies were taken from their captured parents and given to military couples to raise. Many still live unaware of their true identity

One autumn afternoon in 1983, paediatrician Jorge Meijide was called to an apartment in the small town of Acassuso, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. His six-year-old patient turned out to have nothing more than a mild flu, but Meijide sensed that something else was wrong in the household.

The woman who claimed to be the child’s mother seemed to him too old to be his parent. On the walls hung photos of a man in military uniform: presumably the boy’s father.

In 1980s Argentina both details were more than suspect. The country was slowly returning to democracy after the “dirty war” waged by the military dictatorship under Jorge Videla, known as the “Hitler of the Pampa”. After the 1976 coup, Argentina’s military set about crushing any potential opposition and eventually 30,000 people were killed or disappeared, almost all of them civilians. Pregnant prisoners were kept alive until they gave birth and then murdered. At least 500 newborns were taken from their parents while in captivity and given to military couples to raise as their own.

Soldiers frisk a man at a checkpoint in Buenos Aires in 1977. The military dictatorship of 1976-1983 left about 30,000 people missing; Jorge Videla,, who led the military junta from 1976 until 1981. Photographs: Ali Burafi/AFP/Getty Images and Keystone/Getty Images

After the 1976 coup, the military brutally crushed its opponents. At least 500 babies were taken from their captured parents and given to military couples to raise. Many still live unaware of their true identity

One autumn afternoon in 1983, paediatrician Jorge Meijide was called to an apartment in the small town of Acassuso, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. His six-year-old patient turned out to have nothing more than a mild flu, but Meijide sensed that something else was wrong in the household.

The woman who claimed to be the child’s mother seemed to him too old to be his parent. On the walls hung photos of a man in military uniform: presumably the boy’s father.

In 1980s Argentina both details were more than suspect. The country was slowly returning to democracy after the “dirty war” waged by the military dictatorship under Jorge Videla, known as the “Hitler of the Pampa”. After the 1976 coup, Argentina’s military set about crushing any potential opposition and eventually 30,000 people were killed or disappeared, almost all of them civilians. Pregnant prisoners were kept alive until they gave birth and then murdered. At least 500 newborns were taken from their parents while in captivity and given to military couples to raise as their own.

Soldiers frisk a man at a checkpoint in Buenos Aires in 1977. The military dictatorship of 1976-1983 left about 30,000 people missing; Jorge Videla,, who led the military junta from 1976 until 1981. Photographs: Ali Burafi/AFP/Getty Images and Keystone/Getty Images

The case of four Croatian couples arrested in Zambia on suspicion of human trafficking through child adoptions from the Democratic Republic of the Congo has attracted the attention of European institutions, the Croatian Vecernji List daily reported on Monday.

The four married couples from Croatia were arrested at Ndola airport in Zambia in early December on suspicion of human trafficking, based on suspicious adoption documents issued in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. They were released on bail after a court hearing last Thursday.

A statement by the European Commission on cross-border adoptions and the need for greater transparency and closer international cooperation in such cases has been included on the agenda of the plenary session of the European Parliament for February. Discussion was initiated by Croatian MEP Ladislav Ilcic, a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists group, who proposed adoption of a resolution on inter-country adoption.

“Adopting a child is a noble act, but in order to protect children and adoptive parents, we need to put an end to organised crime and patch up the gaps in the system that are used by criminals for child trafficking. That’s why I initiated this resolution, which has quickly received great support from MPs and leaders of political groups,” Ilcic told Vecernji List.

The resolution would call on EU member states to temporarily or permanently suspend child adoptions from DR Congo and other countries with the widespread practice of child trafficking until mechanisms have been established to prevent such practice and potential adoptive parents are provided with an efficient and verified adoption procedure.

Mary wanted to raise her three children, but they were all taken from her. She died before she got justice.

A WOMAN PLANS to take legal action against the State over her mother’s exclusion from the planned redress scheme for survivors of mother and baby institutions.

Evelyn*, who was born into the system, has criticised the fact survivors who participated in the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes (COIMBH) but died before the State apology in January 2021, will be excluded from the scheme.

She is currently in discussions with solicitors and said she will “take whatever legal action is necessary”.

Evelyn told The Journal that many women like her mother, who were not allowed to keep their children, died before they ever got justice.