Bengaluru: The city police have learnt that those running the child smuggling racket took away the passports of children after reaching them to their biological parents in the US, so that the children did not face any problems later, said a senior investigating officer probing into the case. The racket was busted with the arrest of 16 people on Monday.
The officer said that the gang members went to great lengths to prepare the documents for the child.
They ensured that the fake parents of the child were staying at the same address for over a year, prepared wedding certificates, rental agreements, ration cards and voter IDs to apply for passports and visas to fly the children to the US to reunite them with their biological parents. The children’s parents would be staying in the US illegally.
The city police were tipped off about a year ago, but they could carry out only a part of the investigation as they were hampered by jurisdiction issues.
The passport authorities and the US Consulate, which issues the passport are shocked as to how the racket hoodwinked them.
Syndicate’s modus operandi
“After preparing all the fake documents, the gang members procured passports, which were genuine documents and that helped them go under the radar,” said an investigating officer.
Uday Prathap Singh, the alleged kingpin of the racket who operated out of Bengaluru, got such kids from a man in Gujarat and Punjab, whose sole job was to identify such children and send them to Bengaluru.
The gang in Bengaluru then created a fake name for the child and attached the child to fake parents, who are called carriers. In most of the cases, the male member of the fake family would be genuine, carrying a valid passport.
Only in some cases the gang created a fake identity for him too. The “father” would then approach the US Consulate and procure the visa. After the visas were granted to the fake parents, Uday Prathap Singh contacted his men in Gujarat and other states for “procuring” the children. Each carrier couple was given two children and the entire “family” was trained for the visa interview.
“The racket ran successfully because the children’s biological parents had no right to get their kids legally into the US, because they would be either overstaying or they would have declared themselves as refugees. Our interrogation of the 16 arrested culprits proved it too,” said Mr Harisekaran, Additional Commissioner of Police, East.
“We have to verify these in our further investigations and only then the US police will come into the picture. Since the biological parents themselves are illegal immigrants or staying in that country under refugee status, they cannot apply for visas for their children. These parents approached this gang to reunite with their children. Twenty-five to 30 children have been smuggled into the US by the gang,” he said.
