image copyrightBRIAN INGANGA/ BBC
Caption,
Fred Leparan (left) was convicted after trying to sell a baby to an undercover BBC journalist.
Article informationAuthor, Joel Gunter and Anna PaytonRole, BBC Africa Eye
1 hour
A Kenyan hospital employee, who was caught by the BBC selling a baby on the black market, has been found guilty of child trafficking.
Fred Leparan, who worked at the Mama Lucy Kibaki hospital in the city of Nairobi, was filmed receiving $2,050 for a baby in the hospital’s care.
The man was arrested in 2020 following a BBC Africa Eye investigation.
Leparan was charged along with another hospital employee, Selina Awour, with child theft. Awuor was found guilty of three counts of child neglect, but acquitted of the crime of child trafficking.
The couple will be sentenced on September 26.
An Africa Eye reporter initially contacted Leparan posing as a potential buyer, after hearing from a source that the social worker was involved in the illegal trafficking of children into the government-run hospital.
Both parties agreed to a meeting. The undercover journalist told her that she and her husband had been having difficulty conceiving. Leparan only asked cursory questions about her situation before agreeing to sell her the baby.
On the day the boy was supposed to be transferred from the hospital to a government-run children’s home along with two other children, Leparan was filmed falsifying transfer documentation so that the home would expect two children instead of three.
The BBC team ensured that the three children were delivered directly to the children’s home and also ensured that they captured Leparan’s evidence by altering the documentation and saying that the child could be taken by the alleged clients.
image copyrightBRIAN INGANGA/ BBC
Caption,
Selina Awour, who was also a hospital worker, was convicted of child neglect.
Despite the evidence against him, the case dragged on for more than two years. Leparan was able to hire one of the best legal defense in Kenya, but his testimony on the stand was inconsistent and evasive.
Forced to acknowledge that it was him in the incognito recorded footage, he hinted that the voice belonged to someone else, even as his mouth moved in accordance with the words. Later, he admitted that some of the words were his own.
Leparan also claimed that he did not recognize various parts of the hospital where he had worked for three years, despite footage of the man secretly arranging the theft and transfer of the baby being shown to the court.
The BBC investigation revealed the sale of the baby from Mama Lucy hospital, but a former staffer who spoke to Africa Eye on condition of anonymity said he was aware of 12 children from the hospital who had disappeared in just two months.
“There are a lot of corrupt people. As soon as they are given some small sum, they shut up and never speak,” he said, referring to the bribes handed out to staff.
thousands more cases
The purchase of stolen children remains significant in Kenya, a phenomenon fueled by cultural stigma around infertility and adoption, as well as the difficulty in following the adoption process legally.
The hospital scam operated by Leparan represents only one aspect of this complex problem. Africa Eye also filmed traffickers organizing the buying and selling of babies at illegal street clinics, as well as the brazen stealing and selling of babies from homeless and vulnerable mothers living on the streets of the city.
Mary Auma, who ran a clinic where vulnerable mothers gave birth and sold her babies so she could trade them for a profit, disappeared after the undercover team filmed her.
In a new investigation in Nairobi, no sign of Auma was found and her clinic was closed.
But in Nairobi babies are still being abducted. Near the stairs of the now closed clinic, a woman approached the team holding a flyer that featured a photo of her 5-year-old granddaughter, Chelsea Akinye.
image copyrightBRIAN INGANGA/ BBC
Caption,
Rosemary searches for her 5-year-old granddaughter, Chelsea.
The girl was abducted a year and six days earlier, said her grandmother Rosemary, who said she has been looking for Chelsea non-stop ever since, handing out flyers around her neighborhood and elsewhere.
He described the minor as a happy girl with a promising future.
“When she came home from school, she would ask someone close to her to help her with homework before she went out to play,” Rosemary said.
“I have searched for Chelsea all the way to Busia. Since that day, I go out very early in the morning, sometimes at 4 in the morning, to look for her.”
Like other parents or grandparents who have been subjected to the ordeal of having a child taken from them, Rosemary sometimes longs for any form of closure for her loss.
“I imagine that someone abandoned her somewhere, or they killed her and left her somewhere. And I go and bury her, and my heart breaks,” she said.
What does the authority do?
There are few reliable statistics on the extent of child trafficking in Kenya. According to the Secretary of the Labor and Social Protection Cabinet, Florence Bore, between July 2022 and May 2023, the disappearance of 6,841 children was reported. Only 1,296 have returned with their families.
Mueni Mutisya, from the Criminal Investigations Directorate’s Child Trafficking Unit, told the BBC that the unit currently receives an average of around five new child abduction cases per week. Most affect lower-income families, Mueni said.
Caption,
“Emma” helped expose a woman she knew was stealing babies from women on the street.
The day after the initial BBC investigation was published, in 2020, Kenya’s then Minister for Labor and Social Protection Simon Chelugui vowed to crack down on the government to crack down on the trade in stolen children, with those guilty facing up. to “the full weight of the law.”
Last year new laws came into force that strengthened the protection of children in the country, but according to Mueni there is still a lot to be done. He called for new rules requiring the general public to report suspicions that a child may have been abused or abducted.
“Let’s have the common goal of protecting children,” he said.
The most vulnerable children remain those raised by the poorest families, according to Maryana Munyendo, director of the charity Missing Child Kenya, which operates a toll-free line for people to report abductions.
“In Nairobi, we still get a lot of cases from the slums,” Munyendo said.
His hotline still receives an average of three missing child reports each day.
With the additional collaboration of Peter Murimi.
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2023-09-06 23:43:12
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