Police In Rivers Uncover Hospital Where Staff Presents Little Embalmed Corpse To New Mums As Their Dead Babies And Sell Off Living Ones To Clients
Police uncover hospital in Rivers where medical personnel steal live babies from new moms and present an embalmed dead baby to them as theirs
The police in Rivers State have uncovered a hospital for baby trafficking in Port Harcourt, the capital.
According to the police, on June 12, operatives of the Force Intelligence Department stormed the facility after receiving intelligence about crime being committed in the facility.
The police said some mothers had come forward to express doubts over the hospital’s claims that the babies they delivered in the facility passed away.
The police then sent in undercover officers who were able to expose the crime being committed in the facility.
According to the police, babies delivered at the hospital were secretly taken away and sold, while the mothers were deceived into believing that their newborns died during childbirth.
During the raid at the hospital, a bucket with an embalmed baby was discovered in the medical director, 66-year-old, Elizabeth Obot’s office.
The police said that the embalmed dead child was presented to mothers as their dead babies.
Investigations showed that the dead baby was also rented to other trafficking networks or to any woman who may want to use a dead child to deceive her family.
When interrogated, the medical director of the hospital, Elizabeth Obot, who has no licence to operate, said: “In 2020, one of those women who had issues with the police came and asked if I had a dead child, and at the time, I had one. So I told her, she collected it and gave me N10,000.
“I can charge the person who wants to buy the child N3 million. If the person pays, the social mother will get her N2.5 million, while the difference is what I use for logistics.
“The dead child is actually a product of miscarriage. The husband was not around, and when we called him and told him we needed to dispose of the baby, he said okay and asked us to go ahead. I charged him some money, and he paid, but somehow I did not dispose of the baby”
She mentioned that the dead baby was used to help women with fake pregnancies, being pressured by their partners to give them a child.
Obot said such women staged a fake pregnancy, and when it was time to deliver, they pretended they lost the baby and presented the dead child to their partners.
She denied any wrongdoing.
According to her, she had only been helping desperate women seeking the fruit of the womb.
She said the women who came to her to sell their babies did so voluntarily.
One of the suspects, Uffiong Ubong Anthony, revealed that she was not a professional nurse but only learnt how to serve as an auxiliary nurse by studying the activities of nurses in a private hospital.
Uffiongsaid she had worked as a nurse in that capacity for 21 years.
The police have asked anyone who had a stillbirth in the facility to come forward to help with the investigation.
The police advised women to always ensure they had a relative inside the delivery ward to monitor their child after delivery and that their delivery wards had protectors on the window.
According to the police, investigations had shown that delivery wards without windows helped the criminal-minded hospital staff easily steal babies from their delivery rooms.
