You're reading: Russia breaks baby trafficking ring in North Caucasus

MOSCOW - Russian investigators have cracked a ring of human traffickers that specialised in selling babies in the country's volatile North Caucasus region, Moscow's Investigative Committee said on Thursday.

Police detained a 62-year-old woman in the regional capital
of Chechnya when she tried to sell a newborn baby boy for
550,000 roubles ($17,500) to an undercover policeman posing as a
potential client.

The pensioner had also sold an 18-month-old girl to another
undercover policeman earlier this year, the Investigative
Committee said in a statement on its website.

Investigators said they had detained a midwife in the
neighbouring region of Dagestan in relation to the case.

“Investigators are establishing other possible participants
in the crime ring,” said the statement from the committee, a
government agency that handles criminal investigations.

Moscow has patchy control over the North Caucasus, where
Muslim militants are fighting an insurgency aimed at creating an
Islamic state in the predominantly Muslim territory.

The epicentre of daily violence has shifted from Chechnya,
where militants fought two separatist wars against Russian
troops, to Dagestan, a region wracked by inter-ethnic grievances
where residents complain of neglect and poor services.

An unnamed law enforcement official told Interfax news
agency the 62-year-old woman had received the baby boy from
other members of the trafficking ring, brought him to Chechnya
and tried to seal the transaction in the “Yellow Sea Cafe”.

Russian media said the ring was made up of 12 people, some
of whom worked in a hospital in Dagestan and procured babies to
sell to Russians and foreigners.

Human rights groups accuse the authorities in a number of
the North Caucasus regions – stretching from the Black Sea to
the Caspian Sea – of rights abuses committed in the name of
clamping down on the Islamist insurgency.