Word: mss
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Indian police say MSS staff renamed the children and fabricated histories for them, complete with photos of fake mothers supposedly offering them for adoption. False signatures were appended to documents giving vague reasons like "the social stigma of the child being born outside marriage" to justify the infant's surrender. Children were then shipped to wealthy countries, including Australia...
...Families, Youth and Community Care. The sibling is also listed as stolen, from a different family. Queensland's Child Safety Minister Margaret Keech says the allegations are "very concerning," and promises that Adoption Services Queensland "will work very closely with federal and state agencies to investigate these claims." MSS documents sighted by TIME reveal that Zabeen was one of 13 children sent to Australia by the agency; it may also have passed stolen children to other Indian agencies that handled adoptions to Australia and are themselves implicated in trafficking cases...
...reveals alarming procedural flaws. While Australian authorities often took months to vet prospective adoptive parents, monitoring everything from their weight to their fertility, they continued to deal with dubious Indian agencies that had repeatedly been associated with illegal practices, including child stealing. In the Netherlands, which received about 50 MSS children, the government has implemented three inquiries into the adoptions and tightened procedures as a result...
...India-based human-rights lawyer D. Geetha represents parents whose children were adopted overseas by MSS and other agencies. She estimates that at least 30 of the nearly 400 Indian children brought into Australia in the last 10 to 15 years were trafficked. "The Australian government needs to appoint some kind of investigation about all the children who came through this agency; look at their background, look into their documents," she says. "These children are going to want to find their parents. The communication is being lost...
...According to court documents, the group confessed to being part of a gang that stole children and sold them to MSS for 10,000 rupees ($280) each. Manoharan was a former employee of MSS, and eventually the agency's owners, P. V. Ravindranath and his wife Vatsala, were arrested. Officers raided the premises and found the files of 120 children who had been sent overseas for adoption, including at least 13 dispatched to Australia. The pictures were then compared with those on missing-children reports in local police stations...