Woman in child-selling racket busted

A TRADITIONAL medicine practitioner in Tamil Nadu, India, has been arrested for buying babies and children from poor women and selling them to wealthy families, Malaysia Nanban reported.

Megaru Nisha, 60, is said to have opened a clinic near a bus station in Kadalur to help poor people get better using traditional methods.

Her work started innocently enough, but she soon began plotting how to make more money.

It wasn’t long before she got the idea of buying children from poor families and selling them to rich couples who were childless.

Many of the poor families targeted were from the impoverished Kuravar aboriginal community.

After several newborns from the community went missing, a police report was filed, and the authorities began a sting operation, monitoring Megaru’s clinic for a week.

The woman was caught red-handed while she was arranging another sale.

She has since been arrested and placed under remand in a secret location.

● The above article is compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with this ' >'sign, it denotes a separate news item.