Three dead infants found in Hanoi dumpster

Three dead infants found in Hanoi dumpster

Asia-Pacific News

Sep 14, 2009, 9:49 GMT

Hanoi - A sanitation worker found three dead newborn infants in a dumpster near Hanoi's main park, police and sanitation workers said Monday.

The three babies, two boys and a girl, were discovered Sunday evening on a major street just west of Reunification Park. Two were newborns with their umbilical cords still attached, while one was as old as five months, said Nguyen Thi Hien, the supervisor of the sanitation worker who found the bodies.

'We have found dead newborns many times before, and I informed the police then too,' Hien said. 'We think the babies might belong to prostitutes in the area.'

'It's true that we have been informed about babies being thrown in trash cans several times,' district police official Tran Sy Minh said. 'We still haven't found out who did it.'

Child welfare workers said the babies might have been abandoned by unwed mothers whose families refused to care for them, or as part of a human trafficking operation gone wrong.

Le Quynh Lan, a social worker who has dealt with street children in the area where the babies were discovered, said the presence of an older baby among the three infants suggested human trafficking was involved.

'Usually the mother delivers the baby and wants to hide her story, so she drops it at a hospital or in a public area,' Lan said. 'But in this case the child is already four or five months old, so it's a different story.'

On July 19, Hanoi police arrested seven people for running a ring that allegedly trafficked 33 Vietnamese infants to China.

A UNICEF report released this month on child trafficking in East Asia noted that one well-known route involves boys trafficked from Vietnam to China for illegal adoptions.

China's one-child policy drives parents with daughters to search for adoptive sons to carry on their family lineage.