10 Baby Girls Rescued From Old-age Home In Bengal, Suspected To Be Linked With Child Trafficking Network

Ten babies, all of them girls aged between one and 10 months, were recovered from a home for the elderly and mentally ill at Thakurpukur following a midnight raid on Thursday.

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Wrapped in flimsy blankets and soiled bedclothes, the little girls were dumped on the floor of a dank room on the top floor of the nondescript building to be sold when the right customer came up. The sight even moved hardened CID sleuths.

Also Read: Did Doctors Declare Your Newborn Dead? Traffickers May Be Selling Your Baby For A Lakh Or More

"It was a distressing sight.The babies were lying on cold, threadbare and wet mattres. They were barely moving. Egg shells were scattered all around. These used to be burnt to drive away mosquitoes. We found a container with what looked like milk. It turned out to be a mix of buffalo milk and baby food," said an officer.

The old-age home, Purbasha, is owned by Reena Banerjee, daughter of Putul Banerjee, one of the masterminds of the busted baby trafficking racket that has sent shock waves through the state. The infants had been procured from shady nursing homes like the one owned by Putul in Behala and brought to the home to be fed and kept alive before being handed over to buyers in the country and outside. Senior CID officers put the total number of trafficked babies from the home at over 50.

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The baby girls were admitted in the ICU of Thakurpu kur's ESI hospital early on Friday morning, where doctors found them "drowsy and dehydrated". But all of them are now out of danger. Reena was arrested, taking the total number of arrests in the case so far to 16.

Late at night, cops arrested the owner of another old-age home in Joka. Bimal Adhikary, 61, supervised the baby smuggling operation at Purbasha and also housed some of the infants at his facility .

Even as the CID officers were unravelling the Kolkata end of the trafficking racket on Friday , their colleagues were digging up skeletons of infants 100km away in Machhlandapur. The interrogation of NGO worker Marefa Bibi, who was arrested on Thursday led the cops to burial pits on the compound of Sujit Dutta Memorial Welfare Trust, the Machhlandapur NGO involved in human trafficking. "The CID recovered the bodies of two babies from the compound of the NGO," said Rajesh Kumar, ADG (CID).

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According to the investigators, pre-term babies with birth weights less than 1.5 kg were taken to Purbasha, where they were force-fed till they gained enough weight. The newborns that died were buried in the vicinity of the home while those that survived but died before being sold off were bundled out in biscuit cartons and taken to Machhlandapur in Habra.

It was Marefa Bibi who helped bury the dead babies. According to Rajesh Kumar, ADG (CID), seve ral other nursing homes, clinics and NGOs other than the three names that have already surfaced are involved in this racket.

"There will be more raids and hence more arrests, including some even outside the state," Kumar said.

The CID is also investigating the international reach of the accused since a lot of foreign currency was recovered from Partha Chatterjee, owner of Sree Krishna Nursing Home on M G Road, who was arrested on Wednesday. Sashi Panja, minister of state for health and in-charge of women and child welfare said the health department will probe the case.

"It seems mysterious that an adoption racket thrived through an NGO. We have sent a senior officer to Purbasha to ascertain how newborns were kept in an old-age home," she said.