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Another attempt to sell a child prevented in Chechnya

By Umalt Chadayev

GROZNY, Chechnya – On May 2 Chechen police prevented another attempt by medical workers to sell a baby. One of the culprits is a female doctor who was recently shortly detained for the same crime.

The April scandal connected with the exposure of a group of doctors at one of Grozny’s hospital who were arranging the sale of children had not yet died down when another incident in which medical professionals tried to sell a child came to light. And it turned out that Inna Akhtayeva, a female gynaecologist at Grozny’s city hospital who was involved in the recent scandal, was the initiator of the new sale of a baby.

“Now she has been rearrested for having made another attempt sell a baby, this time for five thousand dollars already," a police official says.

According to him, several people involved in committing similar crimes were detained along with Akhtayeva. In addition to the medical workers, an official of the law enforcement agencies also belonged to the organized criminal group which was engaging in the trafficking of children.

"I can’t understand what guided the officials of the prosecutor’s office when they released from detention someone who was involved in children trafficking – a doctor, moreover," says a 48-year-old instructor at one of Grozny’s institutes of higher education. “This is a monstrous, amoral crime, made all the more terrible by the fact that it was carried out by someone who had taken the Hippocratic oath! These people must be taken to court and given their just deserts, even if it means life imprisonment.”

It will be recalled that on April 21 the media carried the first reports that during the processing of operational information federal anti-drug police officials had detained doctors at one of Grozny’s hospitals who were engaged in the trafficking of children. "On April 19 Akhtayeva and her two accomplices were detained by local narcotics agents in the course of a special operation. Posing as "buyers", the law enforcement officials purchased a three-month old baby girl, paying seventy thousand rubles for her. Immediately afterwards the "live goods merchants" were put under arrest. The prosecutor’s office of Grozny’s Leninsky district is undertaking the investigation of this criminal case. As has now become known, citizen Akhtayeva was released after giving a written undertaking not to leave the country," a source in the republic’s law-enforcement agencies said.

Translated by David McDuff.

(MD/T)