BABY BLACK MARKET Pakistan's Stolen Children

In Pakistan, police have busted a child trafficking ring. They ran a black market for babies. Doctors, nurses and the clinics themselves had a hand in it. But many of the children will never return to their real parents.
 

After the birth of her son, Nusrat Khela Orakzai was overjoyed. The Pakistani woman and her husband now had two sons and two daughters. Perfect, they thought. But the happiness only lasted three days. The newborn was taken to a clinic in the nearest larger city, Peshawar, because of jaundice - and kidnapped from his hospital bed.

"If he had died, I could go to his grave and cry. That would be easier - but like this..." says Orakzai and bursts into tears. Since that terrible day a year and a half ago, not a moment has passed when she hasn't thought about her son. 

The family hasn't given up looking for the boy. The little one probably fell into the hands of baby traffickers - not an isolated case in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, a poor province in northern Pakistan : the police are looking for hundreds of missing children there.

"It was a black market for newborns"

The police have only just busted a child trafficking ring , says chief investigator Malik Habib. A group of doctors, nurses and criminals had kidnapped babies from hospitals and sold them to childless couples. "It was a black market for newborns. They sold them off like merchandise." These baby traders charged the equivalent of around 6,500 euros for a boy, while a girl cost just under half that. 

The business with kidnapped babies is flourishing, among other things, because adoptions in Pakistan are complicated and lengthy, explains lawyer Rizwan Khan. "If you apply for adoption today, you might have a child in twenty years."

Police and security services tracked down the gang after the disappearance of a girl in the capital Islamabad two years ago. They had been shadowing suspects for months. Policewomen posed as pregnant and asked suspicious hospitals about abortions banned in Pakistan, while other investigators played potential buyers. “That’s how we got the whole network,” says Habib.

Horrible details in the course of the investigation

During the investigation, grisly details came to light. Doctors had performed abortions close to the due date in order to obtain dead babies. They then swapped the dead fetus with a live newborn, explains Habib. The newborn was sold and the parents were told their child was stillborn. Many parents never knew that their child was actually kidnapped and sold. 

Since the arrests, police have identified hundreds of children who had already been trafficked. But there is still no happy ending for the parents of these children. Authorities have decided to leave most of the stolen children with their new families. They have settled in there and they are good families, they say.

In addition, it would have been a “huge task” to find parents and children through DNA tests. “We might never have been able to finish it.” Some of the affected clinics have already been closed or lacked documentation, he adds. 

Maternity hospitals were closed

Authorities in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa searched several maternity hospitals as part of the investigation and some were closed. Operators have been instructed to improve safety precautions. In the large Lady Reading Hospital in Peshawar, for example, there are now security cameras and security guards do their rounds more often, as a hospital spokesman says.

In addition, name tags are now attached to the arms and legs of the newborns, says doctor Mohammed Jehangir. This was previously not common practice in Pakistan. The babies are under observation and only a few employees have access to the maternity ward. 

For Nusrat Orakzai, these measures come too late. She still hopes that her child will return to her one day.