COLOMBO – A 47-year-old man arrested in Matale for allegedly maintaining ‘baby farms’ was released on conditional bail and two sureties worth Rs 200,000 each by the Moratuwa Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday (23). He was ordered to appear before the Moratuwa Magistrate’s Court on January 4, 2021.
The man was produced before the courts Wednesday morning on charges of child trafficking.
According to Police Media Spokesman DIG Ajith Rohana, the man had tracked down victims of rape and sexual abuse who had become pregnant, housed them at two places in Kaldemulla, Moratuwa, and allegedly entered into an agreement with the women to sell their babies to third parties.
DIG Rohana said such trafficking of infants was called baby farms in other countries and according to Section 360 of the Penal Code, human trafficking is an offence. He said the man will be charged under Section 30 as selling an unborn foetus is seen as human trafficking.
He said investigations conducted by the Child and Women Bureau of Police had found 12 pregnant women to have entered into agreements with the suspect, while five women had already sold their infants to third parties. Three women with their new borns, and another 12 pregnant women were living under the protection of the man at the two places in Moratuwa, Rohana said.
The police had found the man to have sold 30 infants to third parties as soon as they were born, Rohana said.
The existence of so-called ‘baby farms’ was one of the reasons for the Sri Lankan government to suspend inter-country adoption in 1987.
Following a Dutch documentary that showed up to 11,000 of babies born in Sri Lanka were fraudulently sold for adoption abroad in the 1980s, former Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne admitted to the entire world that such things had happened during the 80s, which led to the suspension of inter-country adoption.
-economynext.com