Sofia, Bulgaria
A Bulgarian criminal gang was caught this week transporting pregnant women to other European countries in order to sell their babies. Italian police exposed two of the sales by conducting a sting operation. Posing as doctors and nurses, they saw the transfer of the infants from the Bulgarian mothers to Italian purchasers just after the births in an Italian hospital. Police said they did not know how many children had been sold in this manner, but their sources indicated that baby girls tended to fetch $6,000 and boys twice that. Similar investigations are under way in Portugal and France, where several Bulgarian women have given birth and then left the hospital without their babies.
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