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Gurugram: Four more members of child trafficking gang held
The suspects were identified as Kanchan Kaur, Reena, Satyender Prasad and Palak alias Sarabjeet, all residents of Rohini in Delhi
The Gurugram police on Monday arrested four more members of the infant trafficking gang which was involved in stealing, buying and selling newborns in different states in the country. With this, nine members of the gang have been arrested so far, police said.
The suspects were identified as Kanchan Kaur, Reena, Satyender Prasad and Palak alias Sarabjeet, all residents of Rohini in Delhi. Police said Kanchan and Palak were touts who used to buy and sell children, and Reena and Satyender are a married couple.
Police said they also recovered a stolen child from Palak.
Police said that the 12-member gang had distributed their roles and responsibilities and three of them used to strike a deal with the buyers, while the rest used to travel to other states to identify issueless couples.
In the past two days, the Gurugram police arrested five members, including four women, of the gang.
Preet Pal Sangwan, assistant commissioner of police (crime), said that the gang members used to convince couples from the economically weaker section to sell their children. “They targeted those who already had at least three children and were in dire need of money. They would visit slums and used to take up a room on rent for two months. They used to befriend people and convince them to sell their newborns,” he said.
Sangwan said the gang members used to buy an infant for anything between ₹20,000 and ₹2 lakh and sell the child for ₹50,000- ₹10 lakh.
Two of the suspects -- Surender Kaur and Neha -- who were arrested on Saturday were earlier arrested in 2014 for the similar crime. They had data of more than 300 families, said police, adding that they have recovered their mobile phones and are scanning the data to get exact number of infants sold.
Sangwan said they have recovered a few numbers of surrogacy clinics in Delhi, Gwalior and Jaipur. “We have recovered several fake surrogacy certificates and names of women are same in all certificates who is of one of the suspects,” he said.
The suspects used to visit fertility centres in different states and used to look for childless couples. Then they would source contacts of such couples and later used to give them offers, police said.
Police also said that the members of the gang were in touch with other such gangs in states such as Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Telangana, Punjab, Bihar, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Chattisgarh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Jharkhand.
Four teams of the Gurugram police have left for some of these states to question a few doctors and their staff, said police.
