Three Bulgarians arrested in Greece for selling newborn for 13 000 euro

By Petar Kostadinov

October 7, 2009 / sofiaecho.com

Three Bulgarian nationals have been arrested by Greek police while attempting to sell a two-month-old baby, Bulgarian news agency BTA quoted Greek media as reporting on October 7 2009.

The three Bulgarians, one man and two women, of whom one is the baby's mother, tried to sell the baby for 13 000 euro to undercover police officers who presented themselves as buyers in the town of Katerini in northern Greece.

According to Greek police, the baby was born in August in a hospital on the island of Crete.

The arrest was the latest news of Bulgarians involved in human trafficking in Greece. On June 17, three Bulgarians, two of them lawyers, were apprehended and charged with child trafficking.

They were involved in the smuggling of 16 newborn babies, 13 of whom were ferried to Greek couples. The other three were sent to Bulgarian parents.

Reportedly, the lawyers managed to persuade pregnant women to sell their babies for between 3000 and 5000 leva before selling them on to Greek couples for as much as 40 000 euro per child, the SANS report said.

In June, the United States state department annual report on human trafficking cited Bulgaria as a "source, transit, and, to a lesser extent, a destination country for men, women, and children from Ukraine, Moldova and Romania trafficked to and through Bulgaria to Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Norway, the Czech Republic, Poland, Greece, Turkey, and Macedonia for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor".

According to the data, children are trafficked within Bulgaria and to Greece and the United Kingdom for the purposes of forced begging and forced petty theft, indicating that 15 per cent of identified trafficking victims in Bulgaria are children.