Al-Masry Al-Youm has uncovered one of the most serious cases secretly been investigated by the Egyptian authorities for some two months. The authorities wanted to keep the case – expected to be announced in the coming days – secret till it found out the parties involved, as the crimes are committed by several Egyptian and foreign bodies and persons.
Al-Masry Al-Youm had previously received information about the case, but it preferred to check its authenticity while the investigations were being conducted in complete secrecy at Public Prosecutor Abdel Mahmoud's office to ensure that no information would be leaked to the media.
The daily learnt that a gang of brokers and doctors used to buy newborn illegitimate babies from their mothers and sell them to sterile American families. These families gave the babies the US citizenship and took them to the United States, alleging they had given birth to them in Egypt.
Al-Masry Al-Youm took a month to check the authenticity of the information it had obtained. The story started when the US embassy in Cairo filed a report to Qasr al-Nile Police Station saying that an Egyptian-American woman wanted to issue passports for two newborns, a boy and a girl. She claimed she had given birth to them in Cairo. After that, a police force went to the embassy and arrested the woman, who admitted she had bought the two babies from two brokers, a man and a woman. It later emerged that the gang was composed of two gynecologists, an accountant in a bank and an orphanage supervisor. The defendants admitted they had bought the illegitimate newborns from their mothers and sold them to US families (LE 8,000 for the girl and LE 14,000 for the boy). After that, these families registered those babies at the U.S. embassy in Cairo claiming they had been born in Egypt, seeking US passports for them and then taking them to the United States.
The gang had guides looking for girls and women who became illegitimately pregnant and wanted to get rid of their babies. Those mothers sold their babies without their knowing anything about the new family or the place where their babies would live in.
Days after the arrest of the first US family, other two families went to the US Embassy in Cairo to get passports for other children and when they were arrested they admitted they had got the babies in the same way. The Public Prosecution is expected to refer the case to the Criminal Court within the coming few days, Al-Masry Al-Youm learnt.
