CHENNAI, India - Six hospital staff in southern India have been charged with stealing babies and young children and selling them to childless couples in an illegal adoption racket, police in Karnataka state said on Friday.
The three men and three women, who worked as nurses and lab technicians at five private hospitals and a government-run hospital in Mysuru city, were part of a bigger, organized gang involved in trafficking children, investigating officer Ravi Channannavar said.
"The gang targeted poor couples coming to the hospitals to deliver or get an abortion, in which case they convinced them to deliver the child. They would then steal the babies," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
In other cases, the gang would steal children from beggars on the streets and sell them for $2,995 in cities like Bengaluru.
