Indian man held for selling baby grandson on Facebook 
 
 NEW DELHI — Police in northern India said Wednesday they had arrested a 47-year-old man for selling his newborn grandson to a local businessman in a deal that was struck on Facebook. 
 
 Feroz Khan, a resident of Ludhiana city in the northern state of Punjab 300 kilometres (200 miles) from New Delhi, had allegedly kidnapped his grandson shortly after he was born earlier this month. 
 
 Khan sought help from two temporary employees at a local hospital where his daughter gave birth, who contacted the buyer on Facebook and arranged the deal for 45,000 rupees ($830). 
 
 "All three people who conspired to sell the child have been arrested and we will be interrogating the businessman who paid the money to buy the baby," Satish Malhotra, a senior police officer in Ludhiana, told AFP. 
 
 Police have rescued the baby and returned him to his mother, Noori Khan, a divorcee, who had lodged the complaint against her father. 
 
 The three accused have been charged with kidnapping and they will be produced before a court on Wednesday. If proven guilty, they could be jailed for seven years. 
 
 In 2011, the country's federal police admitted in court that there were 815 gangs comprising more than 5,000 members involved in the kidnapping of children for prostitution and begging across India. 
 
 Copyright © 2013 AFP. All rights reserved. More » ||||| An Indian newborn was allegedly sold for 800,000 rupees ($ 14,750) over Facebook, leading police to uncover a suspected child-trafficking racket, news reports said today. 
 
 The boy, born in a hospital in Ludhiana in the northern state of Punjab, was sold twice before the deal on the social networking site, broadcaster NDTV reported quoting police. 
 
 The infant’s grandfather allegedly first snatched the child from his own daughter, telling her he had been stillborn, to sell him to a nurse for 45,000 rupees, the report said. 
 
 The nurse, in turn, reportedly sold the baby for 300,000 rupees to a hospital lab assistant. 
 
 The infant was then allegedly put up for sale on Facebook by the lab assistant, and a businessman from New Delhi is accused of offering 800,000 rupees for him after seeing photographs. 
 
 The police raided the businessman’s house on Tuesday and recovered the child. They also arrested five people including the grandfather and another man accused of facilitating the deals, the report said. 
 
 The case was the “tip of a iceberg” of a child-trafficking scandal and more details were expected as the alleged middle-man was being questioned, police said. 
 
 Tens of thousands of children in India are thought to be trafficked every year, some for adoption but also many for bonded labour, begging or sexual exploitation. 
 
 It was the first reported case in India of child trafficking over a social networking site, the report said. 
 
 (This article was published on April 24, 2013) ||||| An 80-year-old Spanish nun appeared in court Thursday to face charges that she kidnapped an infant girl as part of a vast baby-trafficking ring that stole newborns from poor mothers and sold them into adoption. 
 
 Sister Maria Gomez Valbuena appeared before the judge and refused to testify, invoking her right to remain silent, Reuters reported. 
 
 The aging Sisters of Charity nun was charged with kidnapping a newborn girl from a Madrid hospital in the 1980s. 
 
 A group of more than 1,000 families said she was part of a nationwide baby-snatching ring dating back four decades. 
 
 The group, Anadir, said the ring involved hundreds of doctors, nurses, priests, nuns and midwives who schemed to convince poor or unwed mothers their babies had died at birth. 
 
 The babies were then sold to families looking to adopt, and the child's birth papers were doctored, the group said. 
 
 Lawyers say Catholic priests and nuns acted as middlemen, paying hospitals workers for babies and then selling them to desperate families. 
 
 “The nuns and priests justified what they did by saying that the child was better off with the adoptive family, but they still took the money,” Enrique Vila, a lawyer who works for families trying to track down relatives, told The Daily Beast. 
 
 Anadir said the racket dates back to the Spanish Civil War, when Francisco Franco’s fascist minions stole babies from political prisoners, Reuters reported. 
 
 In later years, it became a money-making scheme for scores of hospitals and clinics, the group said. 
 
 Since the 1980s, Spanish police have investigated hundreds of claims from mothers who said their babies were stolen, and their stories have been well-documented in the Spanish media. 
 
 In one infamous case, workers at one Madrid clinic kept a dead newborn in the freezer, which they would show to mothers to prove their baby had died, The Daily Beast reported. 
 
 Valbuena is the first person to be charged in the scheme. 
 
 The case against her began after a woman said the nun intimated her into giving up her baby at Madrid’s Santa Cristina hospita in 1982, The Daily Beast reported. 
 
 “I was still half asleep when I asked her where my daughter was,” Marisa Torres Torres told AFP. 
 
 “She told me: ‘Stop asking me that or else I will also take away your other daughter and you will go to jail for adultery.’ ” 
 
 Torres was reunited with her now 29-year-old daughter, Pilar, last year, and said DNA tests proved they were mother and daughter, the Daily Best reported. 
 
 Outside the courthouse on Thursday, a throng of angry mothers and families jeered the nun as she was hustled to a car by police. 
 
 Paloma Perez, 55, told the AFP she believed she was stolen from her birth mother at Santa Cristina hospital in 1957. 
 
 “It is shameful, and on top of it all they protect her,” Perez said, as Valubeana’s car drove away. “I don’t even know who I am.” 
 
 With News Wire Services
– A man in India has been arrested for trying to sell his newborn grandson online. Feroz Khan, 47, is alleged to have kidnapped the baby shortly after his birth in Ludhiana, reports the AFP, telling his daughter the infant was stillborn. He reportedly sold the baby for $830 to a nurse, who sold him to a hospital lab assistant for about $5,500, who in turn sold him to a New Delhi businessman for almost $15,000, the Hindu Business Line reports. Police recovered the baby from the businessman's home. Five people have been arrested over the deals, and the baby was returned to his mother.