Disturbing news this week shows that Portugal may well be one of the destinations used by baby-traffickers. A little boy, admitted to Porto’s Santa Maria Hospital last year, with his apparent adoptive mother, seems to have vanished into thin air since, reports Correio da Manhã newspaper.
The mother was later seen boarding a plane at Francisco Sá Carneiro airport in Porto, but she was not carrying the baby.
Video footage of the same woman has been spotted at airports “in various countries”, says the newspaper. She is always carrying a small baby, but it is never the same child.
Security authorities “began to notice the woman”, “rapidly realising she was never carrying the same infant” and “because the children were always so small”, they realised she couldn’t possibly be the birth mother of all of them. Her trips were made close together, and at no time did close circuit cameras ever catch her looking pregnant.
Correio da Manhã says the authorities believe the woman may well have brought other babies to Portugal, and inquiries among doctors are now ongoing.
The woman has since been detained by police in Belgium who are cooperating with Portuguese authorities working on the theory that Eastern European mafias are using Portugal as a means to sell children.
The sinister report explains also that the ‘false mother’ was able to register the baby, a boy she called Angélico, when she left Santa Maria Hospital, thus giving him Portuguese nationality and “camouflaging his identity”.
The newspaper adds that birth registration regulations in hospitals are “lax”. They suggest the woman engineered the reasons for herself and the baby to be admitted in order to take advantage of the ability to register the baby.
The incident took place in August 2012. ‘Angélico’ has not apparently been seen since.
