DNA uncover s Britons buying Nigerian babies
Simon Heap
A former Oxford University lecturer and his wife are among 12 British couples investigated by police for trying to bring babies into the UK claiming they are their own, in breach of immigration law.
The couple were caught after the British High Commission in Lagos introduced compulsory DNA testing for Britons applying for a passport for a newborn baby in suspicious circumstances.
When DNA sample did not match, officials in Lagos called in the Serious Organised Crime Agency to investigate.
Bharti Patel, chief executive of Ecpat UK, a charity that works with victims of child trafficking, said she believed that it was likely that many more cases would follow the introduction of DNA testing at embassies.
“It is encouraging to see these 12 being reported,” she said.
The first of the 12 to come to court in Britain involved Simon Heap, 47, an academic expert in African studies, and his wife, Gladys Effa-Heap, 52, a nurse.
Last week, the couple, who live in Oxford, pleaded guilty to a breach of immigration law. They admitted they had lied when they applied for a passport for a baby girl at the High Commission in Lagos in 2010.
The couple had used a fake birth certificate and claimed the baby, who was just a few days old, was their daughter. DNA tests showed the child was not related to either of them and she was taken away.
Heap, who lived for a number of years in Nigeria, was previously a fellow in tropical African studies at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford. He now works at the London office of the Japanese government’s aid agency.
The couple were given 12-month suspended prison sentences and 250 hours of community service. Next month, a couple from Degenham, east London, will appear in court on similar charges.
Detective Inspector Kate Bridger, who leads the Paladin team, a joint unit made up of Metropolitan Police officers and officials from Border Force which investigated the Heap case, later referred to police suspicion that there is a trade in babies. “A child should not be treated as a commodity to be bought and sold,” she said.
Andy Elvin, who runs the charity, Children and Families Across Borders, said some British couples were paying middlemen in Nigeria up to 12,000 (pounds) for a baby.
“Sharply-elbowed middle-class parents” fool consular officials in Lagos into issuing passports for the children”, he said.
In the past, a handful of cases have emerged after GPs or social services became suspicious about children already in Britain. Last October, a High Court judge ruled that a London couple, who were unable to conceive, could keep a baby girl born in Nigeria.
The woman’s GP became suspicious after they returned home and DNA tests showed that they were not the child’s biological parents.
They successfully argued that they had been duped into thinking that a Nigerian witch doctor had helped them conceive. The woman said she had been given drugs by the witch doctor to stimulate labour pains.
The British court cases come amid growing concern in Nigeria over an illicit trade in newborn babies. Hundreds of childen are believed to have been taken at birth from vulnerable young mothers and sold to childless couples including foreigners.
According to some Nigerian reports, girls as young as 14 are kept on “baby farms” until they give birth. They are paid as little as 10 pounds for their babies. Others agree to sell their babies to avoid their families finding out they are pregnant or because they are too poor to pay for healthcare.
Earlier this month, 32 pregnant girls were discovered at an alleged baby farm, The Seat of Happiness Care Centre, in a remote area on the edge of the city of Aba, in southern Nigeria.
It described itself as a charitable home for single mothers and orphans. They were housed in bungalows with metal bars on the windows behind a tall security fence topped with barbed wire.
Commandant Ben Dikuro, from the Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps, told Nigerian newspaper The Sun: “Girls who get pregnant are lured to the home with rosy promise of compensation when they deliver.
“Also young girls who need money are also convinced to get pregnant and deliver the child and be paid some amount of money.”
The owner of the home, Nnenna Mba, denied she had ever forced mothers to hand over their babies or sold them.
She told the newspaper the home was properly registered and that any adoptions were dealt with by the authorities.
“We only act as intermediaries,” she said. “They (the mothers) are all conscious. I did not force them. I am a qualified nurse.”
Nkiruka Michael, head of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Traffic in Persons (Naptip) office in Enugu, a state capital in southern Nigeria, said last week that Naptip was campaigning for the law on child trafficking to be tight-ended up.
Lack of resources was hampering efforts, however. The agency has only one vehicle to cover the five states supervised from her office.
“The situation is terribly bad… baby factory operators now enjoy free rein,” she said.
The Sunday Times has learnt that Naptip is investigating another charity that is alleged to have put pressure on vulnerable young mothers to give up their babies. The Refuge, Girls Home in Calabar, in the far South of the country, was set up to help teenage girls with unwanted pregnancies by Mothers Against Child Abandonment, a charity run by Obioma Liyel Imoke, the wife of the governor of Cross River State.
Imoke described allegations against the home as “false, malicious and defamatory” and politically motivated. “We have never, I repeat never, cajoed nor enticed nor forced any of our housemates to give up their babies for any monetary gains or otherwise,” she said.
The charity says all the girls are given the option of keeping their babies or handing them to the authorities for adoption, which it does not arrange itself.
Culled from The Nation
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