HANOI, Vietnam (AP) — Chinese police arrested six people suspected of trying to sell two newborn Vietnamese babies as part of a baby-trafficking ring, Vietnamese authorities said Wednesday.
Police in the Chinese border town of Dongxing detained the six Vietnamese — four men and two women — as they allegedly were transporting two 10-day-old boys inside China just beyond the border, said Nguyen Thai Binh, deputy police chief of Mong Cai in northern Vietnam.
Chinese police made the arrests after acting on a tip from Vietnamese authorities monitoring a smuggling ring, he said.
The initial investigation showed that the six allegedly were paid by ring leaders in Ho Chi Minh City to transport the two babies to China to sell them, Binh said.
The suspects were handed over to Quang Ninh provincial police for further investigation, and the two babies were taken to a social welfare center, he said.
Binh said police in Quang Ninh province will cooperate with Ho Chi Minh City police in investigating where the two babies came from, he added.
Last week, Vietnam announced it would stop processing new adoption applications from U.S. citizens after July 1 following allegations of baby-selling, corruption and fraud.
The announcement came days after The Associated Press published details of a U.S. Embassy report that alleged rampant abuses, including hospitals selling infants whose mothers could not pay their bills, brokers scouring villages for babies and a grandmother who gave away her grandchild without telling the child’s mother.
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The four men and two women, all Vietnamese, were arrested in the Chinese border town of Dongxing and handed to Vietnamese police, who had tipped off their counterparts, said a police officer in the Vietnamese town of Mong Cai.
“We have a cooperation hotline with the local Chinese police. With their help, the smugglers were arrested on Monday,” said the Quang Ninh province police officer who asked not to be named.
The suspected baby smugglers, who were aged between 15 and 66, were transferred to provincial police for further investigation. The two babies were turned over to a social welfare centre, the officer said.
“This is the third baby trafficking case we have detected this year, bringing the number of rescued babies to five,” he said.
Vietnamese police busted a trafficking syndicate in February, which sold babies to China for adoption, reportedly charging about $US500 each for girls and $US1,000 for boys.
The US embassy in Hanoi recently issued a damning report about widespread baby selling and rampant corruption in the adoption system in Vietnam, which led Hanoi to cancel a bilateral adoption agreement.
This made me think that some of the babies being adopted from China then may be ethnically Vietnamese. Can you imagine the adoptee as an adult believing s/he is Chinese only to find out they were kidnapped and smuggled to China from Viet Nam?
This is why tracing my children’s DNA and finding their parents is so crucial. Only then will anyone begin to get at the truth of their child’s origins.
I’m wondering what the penalty is for these crimes and in which country they will be tried.
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