MUMBAI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Police in Mumbai have charged nine alleged members of a baby-trafficking ring - among them a nurse at a maternity hospital and agents who operated in the impoverished slums of India’s financial capital, officials said on Monday.

In the second such case in the city in five years, the nine are accused of having bought and sold at least seven babies over a six-year period.

The mothers of three infants and a man who had bought a baby were also arrested in a four-day police operation.

“We’re now investigating how many more children have they sold and if there are more agents operating in the area,” said police inspector Yogesh Chavan, who received a tip-off about the baby-trafficking racket last week.

“The mothers of the babies were poor and the buyers were couples desperate for a child,” he said.

YAOUNDE - Cameroon police said Saturday they have opened investigations into a network of traffickers who allegedly buy babies from the central African state to sell in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some members of the network, believed to have illegally sold scores of children, were arrested Saturday in Cameroon’s capital, Yaoundé, with babies they had bought and a mother who said she wanted to sell her unborn child because she is poor. The mother was also arrested.

Baudouin Gweha, senior official of the Gendarmerie post at Mimboman, a Yaoundé neighborhood, says he arrested 41-year-old Pierre Essola for carrying out an activity that violates human dignity.

Essola tells Cameroon police that all negotiations with potential buyers and sellers of babies are by telephone.

He says he found a Congolese woman on social media who was offering to help teenage and single mothers to take care of their newborn babies. He says he immediately contacted the Congolese women through WhatsApp and told her that many young girls with unwanted pregnancies in Cameroon need help. He says he recorded and sent videos of poor teenage mothers to the woman in Congo. He says while in Cameroon, the woman disclosed to him that she had another partner who helps her to buy babies from the coastal Cameroonian city of Douala.

Essolla said his intention is to help poor mothers, especially teenagers who abandon their babies on the streets because there is no one to help take care of the babies.

MUMBAI: The city crime branch busted a baby-selling racket with the

arrest of eight people, including a pathology lab technician.Accordingly to

the police, the accused would approach new mothers from economically

weaker sections and offer to facilitate the ‘adoption’ of their babies for a

price—Rs 60,000 for a newborn girl, and Rs 1.5 lakh for a boy. Preliminary

The inmates and management of Keshav Bahety Surjudaya Children Home at Gangabari

near Makum in Tinsukia district have reason to rejoice as two couples from Malta

OUR CORRESPONDENT

TINSUKIA: The inmates and management of Keshav Bahety Surjudaya Children Home

at Gangabari near Makum in Tinsukia district have reason to rejoice as two couples from

MUMBAI: The city crime branch has busted a gang of eight including six

women who were into selling new born babies.

Shockingly while the baby girls were sold for Rs 60,000, baby boy was

sold for Rs 1.50 lakh. Preliminary investigations have suggested that the

gang has in six months have sold four babies, but police suspect the

SEOUL -- Protesters with the phrase "death penalty" painted in red on their face masks chanted and erupted in shrieks as they counted down to the start of a trial at Seoul Southern District Court on Wednesday morning.

The crowd was waiting to see if prosecutors would upgrade the charge to murder for a woman whose alleged brutal abuse led to the death of her adopted child, Jeong-in, in October at the age of only 16 months.

Their cries were heard. Prosecutors, under criticism for being too lenient, raised their earlier sentencing recommendation from involuntary manslaughter by child abuse after forensic experts reexamined the cause of the death. A second sentencing trial has been scheduled for April 17.

"The key point of the revised indictment is that the defendant caused a blunt-force injury by stepping strongly on the victim's back, with knowledge that applying force on the victim's abdomen, which had already been damaged, could lead to death," the prosecution said.

The adoptive mother denied the allegations, saying she had "no such intention" to cause the victim to die, while admitting to some of the abuse charges, including the fracturing of Jeong-in's left collarbone and right rib.

Sisters allegedly forced to give birth by their killers so offspring could be sold to clients in Greece

By

Yannis-Orestis Papadimitriou

IN ATHENS

17 January 2021 • 5:48pm

A woman who won a legal battle to adopt a boy in Uganda has brought him to the UK for the first time.

Emilie Larter, 29, from Worcestershire, was volunteering for a children's charity in the African country in 2014 when she took care of a baby whose mother had died.

Five years later, after raising thousands through crowdfunding, she was allowed to adopt Adam, now six.

However, she now has to go through the legal process all over again in the UK.

Being in England is "surreal", she said, "but he's loving the attention".

SURVIVORS AND CAMPAIGNERS have criticised how the final report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes deals with the issue of adoption.

The long-awaited report – which was published on Tuesday and can be read here - said the commission found “little evidence” of forced adoption.

The document, spanning 2,865 pages, details the experiences of women and children who lived in 14 mother and baby homes and four county homes between 1922 and 1998.

It acknowledges that mothers often had little choice in terms of adopting their children, but also states that women and girls had “time after the initial placement for adoption to reassess the situation”.

The report notes that private adoption placements were not illegal in Ireland until the late 1990s but such practices “facilitated illegal registrations of birth”. In many cases, a person’s adopted parents were listed as their birth parents on the cert.

The letter, which has a baby photograph attached, recounts her physical appearance and details of her health. “A very nice baby with beautiful fair skin, blue eyes and sandy hair . . . not breast fed at any time . . . is 100 per cent free from TB.”

“It was like they were selling a doll,” says Sheila Shelton, now 63, who is talking about the letter an unnamed nun at the Seán Ross mother and baby home wrote to her then prospective parents in St Louis, Missouri in 1958.

“When I saw that piece of paper first, what really jumped out at me was the part about my mother. That she was a ‘highly educated’ lady. I was happy to know something about her, but it really upset me too at the same time.

“Why would an educated lady give up a child? If she was poor, it would have made more sense to me. I was confused,” says Shelton, speaking from Hawaii, where she now lives with her wife, Sarah. She first saw the letter when her adoptive mother gave it to her when she was 21.

Her mother is described as: “a trained nurse . . . a very well-mannered girl and highly educated.” Her “said father is a local farmer (of this we can never be sure).”