Bulgarian gang sold babies 'like puppies'

Police posing as doctors and nurses have arrested six people on charges of belonging to a Bulgarian gang selling babies "like puppies'', primarily to childless couples but also possibly to paedophiles living in Italy and France.

Police posing as doctors and nurses have arrested six people on charges of belonging to a Bulgarian gang selling babies "like puppies'', primarily to childless couples but also possibly to paedophiles living in Italy and France.

Officers in the northern Italian city of Trieste stumbled on the trade in newborn babies by accident through a routine phone-tap on a suspected Bulgarian mafia gangster, Stefano "Stevo'' Braidich, 44. Investigation revealed that "countless'' babies have been sold to western European countries, with infertile Italian couples paying €4,000 (£2,640) for a girl and up to €17,000 for a boy.

But officers say the arrests of three Bulgarians and three Italians last month may have touched only a small part of baby-trafficking from Bulgaria. Some infants, they say, may have been purchased for sale to paedophiles or for organ transplants. "Newborn babies were bought and sold like puppies,'' one policeman told La Stampa newspaper.

The babies' natural mothers were recruited by the mobsters in Bulgaria and driven to a hospital near Milan to give birth. Fake fathers paid the gang, then officially claimed paternity. The six arrested included two Bulgarian mothers accused of selling babies, two "fathers" and a middle-man from the gang.

Three police officers posing as newly qualified doctors and nurses witnessed the birth of two babies who were taken to Italian orphanages after the arrests of their mothers and would-be fathers. The last Bulgarian mother arrested, Svetla Mihaylova, 32, said the baby she tried to sell was her fourth but the only one she had sold. She was charged immediately after giving birth by caesarean. She said she had agreed to sell her baby because she could not afford to feed her other children.

Children's rights groups believe that up to 10,000 Bulgarian children and young people could be involved in trafficking for sex alone. They say that more than 30,000 children and babies are abandoned in Bulgaria every year.