Bengaluru: Three women among five arrested for selling children

Bengaluru: The Bangalore police have arrested a gang of five miscreants, including three women who bought new-born babies from poor parents and sold them for a huge sum to childless couples.

The arrested are identified as, Ranjana Devi Das (32), a resident of Thane in Maharastra, Devi (26), a resident of MS Palya, Dhanalakshmi (30) from Mallasandra, Mahesh Kumar (50) of Kathriguppe in Bengaluru and Janardhan (33) of Erode district of Tamil Nadu.

The Bangalore South DCP Harish Pandey said they traced 12 children sold by the gang and their parents. The children have been handed over to the children welfare committee.

On April 5, on a tip-off that Devi of Wilson Garden was selling children from Mumbai, an undercover police team nabbed her.

According to police, the gang was detained after Ranjana who had come to sell the child at Majestic railway station was arrested.

He said investigations are also being carried out to find out how many children were sold by the gang to childless couples.

Harish Pande explained that the police got a breakthrough in busting the racket after they found out 28 mothers' cards were issued to pregnant and lactating mothers from the house of one of the accused persons. "At that point, we did not know that the mother's card was fake or belonged to original mothers. The police department tracked 12 kids one by one. Mother's card was manipulated to show parents who bought the children as biological parents," he stated.

A nurse and compounder of a private nursing home were involved in this racket and they issued the mothers' cards with fake signatures. The accused sold the kids in various districts in Karnataka. The police are also booking the fathers who sold their kids to the accused persons. However, the people who bought the kids are not being booked, the official said.

"We have arrested the middlemen and woman. The department needs to trace and identify a few more children. Some of the people who are presently bringing up the children are willing to adopt them. However, the Child Welfare Committee has to give official orders," he said.

The surveillance cameras have shown the movements of the accused in various hospitals in Bengaluru. They would visit hospitals and make offers of money to gullible and poor parents to sell their new-born babies. They also collected information about parents who are getting treatment at fertility centres. They had access to the contact numbers and approached them with the offer of surrogacy, he said. IANS