ITALY: Italian police have broken up a gang taking pregnant Bulgarian women to give birth in Italy and selling their babies for as little as €5,000.
After posing as nurses and medical interns at a Milan hospital where the babies were born, police arrested six people alleged to be involved in the sale of at least two infants.
The case is thought to be the latest evidence of a thriving global child trafficking market, which aid agencies estimate involves more than 1 million children and is worth $1.2bn a year.
"The mechanism we have discovered is very worrying because we do not know if or how many times it has been used," said Vincenzo Stingone, the police chief heading the inquiry in the northern regions of Friuli Venezia Giulia and Milan.
To avoid the risks involved in smuggling babies across borders, traffickers offered impoverished pregnant Bulgarian mothers the chance to give birth in a clean western European hospital, sell their children into a supposedly better life and return home with a pocket full of cash, police allege.
The gang charged a starting price of €5,000 for a girl and up to €17,000 for a boy, a small part of which went to the mothers.
Two mothers were driven to Italy, with tourist visas, in the last stages of pregnancy. They waited at a Roma Gypsy camp near the town of Gorgonzola outside Milan until going into labour, and then gave birth at Melzo hospital in Milan. But after the birth, as agreed with the traffickers, the mothers refused to recognise their children, as is permitted under Italian law for women who do not want to keep their babies.
Instead the new "owners", posing as the babies' fathers, claimed the children and registered them with local authorities as theirs.