Woman smuggled baby into UK using fake birth story

Last summer, a woman was arrested at Gatwick airport after her Nigeria arrived with a very young little girl.

The woman lived in the West Yorkshire with her husband and children, and before leaving the United Kingdom for Africa, she had told her general practitioner that she was pregnant.

It was not true.

When the woman returned about a month later with the baby, she was arrested for suspicion of traffic.

The case, the second of the BBC has followed by the family court in recent months, reveals that what experts say is a disturbing trend for babies possibly brought to the United Kingdom-some of the so-called “baby factories” in Nigeria.

The woman, whom we call Susan, is Nigerian, but had lived in England since June 2023, with her husband and children.

Careworker with leave to stay in Great Britain, Susan said she was pregnant. But blood tests and tests have shown that it was not true. Instead, they revealed that Susan had a tumor, which, according to doctors, could be cancerous. But she refused the treatment.

Susan insisted that her previous pregnancies had been invisible to the analyzes, saying to his employer: “My babies are still hidden”. She also said she had been pregnant for 30 months with her other children.

Susan had gone to Nigeria in early June 2024, saying that she wanted to have her baby there, then contacted her local hospital in Great Britain, to say that she had given birth.

Doctors were affected and contacted children’s services.

Arriving in the United Kingdom with the little girl – whom we call Eleanor – Susan was arrested and arrested by the Sussex police.

She was released on bail and the main police forces confirmed that there was no active investigation at the moment.

After her arrest, Susan, her husband and Eleanor received DNA tests. Eleanor was taken to feed the caregivers.

“When the results show that I am Eleanor’s mother, I want her to be returned immediately,” said Susan.

But the tests showed that the baby had no genetic link with Susan or her husband. Susan asked for a second test – which gave the same result, then she changed her story.

She had an IVF treatment before moving to Great Britain in 2023 with an egg and a donor sperm, she said, and that is why DNA tests were negative.

Susan has provided a letter from a Nigerian hospital, signed by the medical director, saying that she had given birth to it, as well as a document from another clinic on IVF processing to support her claims.

She also provided photos and videos which, she said, showed her in the work of the Nigerian hospital work. No face is visible in the images and one showed a naked woman with a placenta between her legs, with an umbilical cord always attached.

The Leeds family court sent Henrietta Coker to investigate.

Ms. Coker, who provides expert reports to family courts in business like this, has almost 30 years of experience as a social worker. She trained in Great Britain and worked on the front line on child protection in London, before moving to Africa.

Ms. Coker visited the medical center where Susan said she had IVF. There was no file that Susan followed a processing there – the staff told him that the letter had been falsified.

She then visited the place that Susan said she had given birth. It was a shabby three -bedroom dish, with “stained” walls and “dirty” carpets.

There, Ms. Coker was met by “three young teenage girls sitting in the reception room with nurses’ uniforms”.

She asked to speak to the matron and “entered the kitchen where a teenager ate rice”.

Ms. Coker then found the doctor who had written a letter saying that Susan had given birth to it. He said, “Yes, someone had given birth.”

Ms. Coker showed her a photo of Susan, but it wasn’t her, said the doctor.

“The identity of people is common in this part of the world,” he told Ms. Coker, suggesting that Susan could have “bought the baby”.

The practice of “baby agriculture” is well known in West Africa, Ms. Coker told court. At least 200 illegal “baby factories” have been closed by the Nigerian authorities in the past five years, she said.

Some contained young girls who had been kidnapped, raped and forced to give birth several times.

“Sometimes these girls are released,” said Ms. Coker, “other times, they die during childbirth, or are murdered and placed in the organization.”

We do not know where the baby Eleanor could come – although the doctor told Ms. Coker that he thought she would have been voluntarily abandoned.

Ms. Coker could not establish who are the real parents of Eleanor.

She testified to the Leeds family court in March this year, with Susan, her husband, her employer and a senior obstetrician.

During a previous hearing, the judge asked the Susan phone exam. Investigators found messages that Susan had sent to someone recorded in his address book like “Mum oft [sic] Lagos Bébé “.

About four weeks before the alleged date of birth, Susan wrote an SMS that was read:

“Hello my, I have not seen the articles of the hospital”

The same day, Baby Lagos mom replied:

“The drug on delivery is 3.4 m

“Bill at the 170k hospital.”

Assuming that these Nigerian Nigerian sums would be respectively in the region of £ 1,700 and £ 85, the family court judge, said William Tyler KC.

The local authority pointed out that the messages were defined on “the automatic self -destructive mode” – and said they represented evidence of an agreement to buy a baby.

Susan tried to explain the messages before the court. The recorder said his attempts were “difficult to follow and impossible to accept”.

Recount Tyler, seated as deputy judge of the High Court, revealed that Susan had “organized a scene” that she falsely told her birth in Eleanor in Nigeria.

He said that Susan and her husband had put forward a “fundamental lie” to explain how Eleanor came to their charge and had tried to induce the inductible authorities with false documents.

They both caused the little girl “an important emotional and psychological damage,” he said.

At the beginning of July, the BBC attended the final hearing in the Eleanor case, held at a distance.

In a small square in the team meeting, we could see Susan and her husband, barely moving, were focused closely on what the defenders said.

They wanted Eleanor to return to them. Their lawyers said that their own children were prospering – they wanted to offer him the same love and the same care.

Susan’s husband considered Eleanor as “a fundamental part of their family unity”.

Vikki Horspool, representing the Guardian of the child, an independent social worker Children and Family Child Advisory Service challenged this. She said that the couple “continued to be dishonest” about the real start of Eleanor in life and the way she has become their responsibility.

The judge ordered that the baby Eleanor be placed for adoption and also made a “non-fascination declaration”. He said he was aware of the “pain” that would cause Susan and her husband.

The lawyer for the local authority told court that the baby was “very installed” with his caregiver with a host family, participating in activities in his community and obtaining medical treatment.

When Eleanor is adopted, she will have a new British identity and nationality – but she may never know who her real parents are.

The story of Eleanor echoes the case of “Lucy” – which was brought to Manchester airport in 2023, by a man claiming to be his father.

Ms. Coker believes it is likely that more children have been illegally brought to the United Kingdom from West Africa. She told the BBC that she had worked on a dozen similar cases from the pandemic. According to his experience, baby traffic is common.

“Money is exchanged for large-scale children,” she said-not only in Africa but “in the world of world”.

Since 2021, the British government has restricted the adoptions of Nigeria, in part because of the “evidence of the trafficking of organized children” in the country.

British authorities have been aware of the problem for many years, and there have been several cases in the family of the family in the past 20 years.

Two hearings in 2011 and 2012 involved Nigerian couples who had “fertility treatment” which led to a “miracle baby”.

These “treatments” are continuing, as recently exposed by investigative journalists at BBC Africa Eye.

In 2013, the British High Commissioner in Lagos demanded DNA tests in certain circumstances before newborns could be transported from Nigeria to Great Britain.

Among 12 couples surveyed, there was an ancient Oxford academic, prosecuted for immigration offenses.

However, this process has since stopped. In 2018, officials were informed that such DNA tests were illegal.

They were told that they could not subjive people suffered from DNA when they asked for a visa or a passport in support of a request for immigration status – and this was the case since 2014.

Ms. Coker said that some clinics offer “packages” that include recording the baby’s birth. It will cost between £ 2,000 and 8,000, excluding any plane ticket, she said.

She thinks that more people in Britain should be aware of this activity.

It is difficult to tackle, she said-maybe the DNA tests for newborns and alleged parents would help.

But she was not sure that the British government could do a lot to stop it, she said: “The problems begin in the countries where children are born”.

Patricia Durr, CEO of the anti-traitic charitable organization, ECPAT, said that cases like this were particularly “odious” because they denied a child to a right to their identity.

She said: “All efforts must be made to prevent these blatant crimes.”

A government spokesperson said: “He is illegal.

“Border forces are determined to protect people who cross the border and where concerns are raised, agents will take measures to protect people who may be in danger.”

The BBC contacted the Nigerian High Commissioner for Comments but they did not respond.

If you have been affected by the problems raised in this story, there is information and support available on BBC Action Line.

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