A charity worker has been arrested in Ukraine after he was caught attempting to take an 11-month-old baby out of the country to “sell for organ transplants,” according to the Daily Mail.
The 43-year-old man is being called an “evil child trader” after he allegedly paid $1,000 to the boy’s mother, telling her he would make sure the boy was safely adopted in a European Union nation away from the current war waged on Ukraine by Russia. He told the mother he would give her another $4,000 for the baby to bring him to safety when he was actually planning to sell the baby to traffickers for $25,000.
Video shows the man and his female accomplice being detained as they attempted to cross the border into Slovakia. Sadly, according to the Daily Mail, while this boy was saved, the man previously sold three other children to traffickers after telling parents he was finding them adoptive families. According to journalist Vitaliy Glagola, the man “had been looking for parents who were ready to sell their child for organs.”
The baby’s mother in this case contacted law enforcement and the Security Service of Ukraine secret service and border guards were able to stop the man at a checkpoint after receiving “operational information that this was not for adoption to the EU, and the child was to have been sold to organ transplanters,” said Glagola. He is now being held in custody as an investigation launches, and he faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
The United States Institute of Peace announced in 2022 that Russia’s war on Ukraine has created a human trafficking crisis in which women and children are being exploited and sold. Pramila Patten, the United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, called it “a crisis within a crisis.”
The majority of refugees are women and children who are ‘easy targets’ of criminals who promise them safety and free transportation in order to get them away from official checkpoints, said charity workers on the Polish-Ukranian border.
Less than a year ago, a teenage Ukrainian girl believed to have intellectual disabilities was saved from trafficking after she arrived at an airport with no identification. She told a social worker that the man she was with was her uncle, then she claimed he was her cousin before it was revealed that she was not related to him at all.
She is one of an “unprecedented” number of unaccompanied children arriving in Ireland, according to Irish child and family agency Tusla.
