A 43-year-old man was caught red-handed this week trying to smuggle an 11-month-old baby out of Ukraine to deliver to child traffickers so they could "sell" the child "for organ transplants."
An alleged "charity worker" whom the media is now referring to as an "evil child trader," the man was detained by authorities after being caught with the child in hand.
According to reports, the man gave the child's mother a $1,000 down payment, claiming he would ensure the boy was rescued out of the war and safely adopted by a family somewhere else in the European Union (EU). He allegedly offered the woman, from Zhytomyr, a total of $5,000 for the baby, whom he intended to sell to traffickers for $25,000.
The man was with an unidentified female accomplice at the time he was captured trying to move across the Ukraine-Slovakia border. Thankfully, authorities arrested him and saved the child, however there were three other children before this whom the man successfully sold for cash.
(Related: California is trying to legalize state-sponsored child trafficking under the guise of providing "sanctuary" for underage children from other states and countries to come receive transgender mutilation and castration surgeries.)
Child traffickers taking advantage of Russian invasion chaos in Ukraine
After being reunited with his mother, the 11-year-old baby boy was seen high-fiving a soldier.
"Law enforcement officers have operational information that this was not for adoption to the EU, and the child was to have been sold to [illegal] organ transplanters," reported Vitaliy Glagola, a Ukrainian journalist.
The man who attempted to smuggle the child out of Ukraine "had been looking for parents who were ready to sell their child for organs," Glagola added in a statement.
The reason why law enforcement was able to capture the culprit and his accomplice is because the boy's mother alerted them about what was taking place. SBU secret service and border guards then readied to detain him at the Malye Selmentsy frontier checkpoint.
The man is now being held under child trafficking laws, and could face up to 15 years in jail if convicted, according to a police spokesman.
It has become increasingly common in impoverished eastern Europe for children and babies to be sold on the black market by gangs tied to organ transplant networks. In many cases, the recipients of the organs are wealthy clients, particularly from the Middle East.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, things ramped up even more as all the chaos led to many more people than usual using border crossings in a rush to flee the country. This allowed human traffickers the opportunity to slip by more easily while preying on desperate refugees.
Early on in the war, reports emerged of criminals targeting unaccompanied female refugees and children as they fled from Ukraine, falsely promising to help provide them accommodations and safety, as well as free transport.
These criminals posing as "good Samaritans" would then lure their victims away from the safety of government checkpoints in order to exploit them.
Charity workers at the Poland-Ukraine border have also warned that some traffickers are working alone, while others are in gangs, to kidnap women and children whom they spot as an "easy target."
"[We see teams] waiting for people arriving from Ukraine and pretending to offer rides or lodging to women distressed and exhausted from their journey," said Karolina Wierzbi?ska, a coordinator at the human rights organization Homo Faber in the Polish city of Lublin, about how teams of people working together, including multiple couples at a time, are visiting the Polish border while pretending to offer Ukrainian refugees rides to safety.
Child trafficking is a prolific problem that must be dealt with. Learn more at Trafficking.news.
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