Vietnam arrests two suspects in baby-selling scam

Updated Thu Jul 17, 2008 12:23am AEST

Police in communist Vietnam have arrested the heads of two health centres suspected of forging documents in a scam that put up infants for overseas adoptions.

The suspects in northern Nam Dinh province allegedly issued fake birth certificates for the under-five-year-olds, who were then sent to centres that arranged more than 300 international adoptions, state media has reported.

The arrests come three months after the US embassy in Hanoi detailed endemic baby-selling and graft in the adoptions system in a nine-page report that led Vietnam to suspend a bilateral adoption agreement.

The US probe released in April found that some American adoption agencies had paid $10,000 “donations” per child to orphanages after officials had forged birth certificates and wrongly identified the infants as abandoned.

In some cases, the natural parents had been cheated into giving up their babies, while other infants had been procured from illegal centres that paid pregnant women to give up their newborns, the US investigation found.

- AFP

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