Police arrest 19 for trading babies

Shanghai police have arrested 19 people involved in the trade of 14 babies, local media reported Tuesday.

Police said that the majority of the suspects were the parents of the involved children, according to a report in the Oriental Morning Post. For the more part, neither the buyers nor the sellers were professional human traffickers.

Parents posted their children's information on a website. Later, they would be accepted to online messenger groups where they could talk to potential buyers.

The buyers paid through an online shop run by a website under the guise of a jewelry store.

Police arrested the two people who ran the online messenger groups. Those two suspects collected a fee, about 3,500 yuan ($565), for helping families to get fake birth certificates so that the children could be properly registered with authorities.

The only legal way for families to adopt a child is by registering with local civil affairs departments, said Yang Jian, a senior officer with the local police.

The suspects included a retired kindergarten teacher surnamed Shen, who bought a boy after her daughter-in-law became infertile. Shen paid 50,000 yuan to the seller, a woman surnamed Wei, who could not afford to raise a second child.

They had the website take charge of the fake certificates so that the boy could have Shanghai residency.

After her arrest, Shen said that she did not know it was illegal to buy a child. She pointed out that some of her students had been adopted in similar ways.

Police found another Shanghai couple who sold their baby boy for 35,000 yuan because they needed the money.

Police spent two months investigating the case. They found 10 girls and four boys who had been traded this way.

Although parents can have their children fostered or adopted through the civil affairs department, the process takes a long time and doesn't allow the parents to choose who gets custody of their children, a source familiar with the case told the Global Times.