Another father arrested in Tete for trying to sell his child

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Another father arrested in Tete for trying to sell his child

3:32 CAT | 15 Feb 2018

Photo: Folha de Maputo

A 50-year-old man has been jailed for allegedly attempting to sell his six-year-old son in Mozambique’s Tete province. This is the same province where, in May, a couple was arrested for trying to sell their albino boy and, in October, another arrest was made of a man trying to sell a 13-year-old girl.

The most recent case happened last Sunday (11), in Tete city’s Matundo neighbourhood.

Police authorities are accusing the man, whose identity has not been revealed, of attempted trafficking in human beings.

Police spokeswoman Lurdes Ferreia told the press that the man was detained before contacting the alleged buyer, so preventing the child from disappearing.

This is one of a number of cases which have come to notice of parents using their own children as a medium of exchange.

In May last year, a couple were arrested in Tete for attempting to sell their two-year-old son, who suffered from albinism, for four million meticais, in collusion with five individuals they had allegedly contacted.

The couple travelled from Doha district to Moatize to carry out the transaction, believing that was where potential buyers could most easily be found. The intermediaries in the sale would receive 50,000 meticais commission, police said at the time.

In October of the same year, a man called Estefânio Máquina was apprehended by the PRM, as he attempted to sell his 13-year-old daughter for just over 2,360,000 meticais to unidentified individuals.

Máquina allegedly contacted José Carlos, chairman of the Mozambican Herbalists Association, to ask him for help in finding a client. When he spoke to José Carlos, Máquina was accompanied by two of his five children. To convince them to leave the house for the place where the girl was supposedly to be sold, Máquina told the children they were going to meet their mother, who was returning from Chiúta.

Source: A Verdade