Brutal child slave trade uncovered on Romanian pig farm

A near-fatal accident on a pig farm in Romania has uncovered a brutal new trade in forced labour in which poverty-stricken parents sell their children into slavery for as little as £70.

Gheorghita Ciornei, 13, was taken to a hospital in Bucharest last week suffering from 60 per cent burns after an accident involving a power line. As doctors struggled to save the boy's life a farmer from Gostinu, a village 30 miles south of the capital, arrived to claim him. The man said he was the child's "master". Hospital officials refused to hand the child over and called the authorities.

Investigators found that Gheorghita and his younger brother had been working on the Gostinu pig farm for more than a year, after the farmer bought them for £140.

Save the Children said the brothers were the victims of a new trade in which employers from better-off areas in the south of the country were buying child labour from the impoverished north-east.

"This is modern-day slavery," said George Roman, a programme director for Save the Children. He said the boys were not alone and that dozens of others were doing hard labour, some as young as nine.

The case has revealed the growing wealth gap in the European Union candidate country which is negotiating to join the 25-country bloc in 2007. High unemployment and soaring poverty are driving people to abandon poorer northern areas in search of work in the western region of Transylvania or close to Bucharest.

The children were forced to work 14-hour days and received only food and lodging. In some cases parents leased their children for a monthly fee of £12. Police inquiries in Gostinu and the surrounding region of Giugiu found at least 16 other cases, including nine on the farm where Gheorghita was electrocuted after climbing a telegraph pole while tending the pigs.

Officials believe other "masters" have gone into hiding since the accident.

"The whole area has been poisoned by this new phenomenon. People are taking advantage of the naivety, desperation and poverty of these parents," said Mr Roman.

One angry local farmer confronted television cameras saying: "If you take these children we will buy others." Under Romanian law those found guilty of trafficking children face up to 15 years in prison.

Reporters who traced the boys' family to their home in Ceplenita, in the north-eastern Moldavia region where most of the traded children are believed to come from, said they lived in near-medieval conditions. The couple, who have 15 children, were living in a house made of mud and straw, with sheets of nylon for windows and an intermittent electricity supply. "The father is a drunk, he drinks all the money and he still doesn't get much to drink," Razvan Chiruta, a local reporter, told The Independent.

Pintilie Penciuc, the director of the child protection agency in the regional centre of Iasi, said proceedings had started to take the Ciornei brothers into care.

The case has led to criticism of the authorities. Allegations were made in 1999 by a boy who claimed to have escaped from a regime of forced labour and beatings in the same region, but police did not investigate.