{"id":2014,"date":"2008-08-30T17:58:19","date_gmt":"2008-08-30T17:58:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.againstchildtrafficking.org\/?p=2014"},"modified":"2011-03-09T17:59:49","modified_gmt":"2011-03-09T17:59:49","slug":"stolen-child-ok-to-stay-in-queensland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/stolen-child-ok-to-stay-in-queensland\/","title":{"rendered":"Stolen child ‘OK to stay in Queensland’"},"content":{"rendered":"
Source: Stolen child “ok to stay in Queensland<\/a>\u00a0<\/div>\n
Scott Carney, <\/strong>August 30, 2008<\/div>\n

N<\/strong>ovember 11th, 1998, was like any other day in Chennai: hot and humid. Fatima, a young housewife with three children left her house for a grocery run across the street while two of her children, Zabeen, 2, and Sadaam Hussein, 4, played in an alley.<\/p>\n

A three-wheel auto rickshaw pulled up at the alley entrance and the children peeped inside. A woman reached down and grabbed Zabeen and Sadaam and dragged them into the back of the rickshaw. The driver, a man, sped away, but Sadaam managed to break free, running home to an empty house and cowering under a small wooden bed. He was so shaken he was unable to tell his mother immediately that his sister had been stolen.<\/p>\n

“I can still remember their faces,” says Sadaam, now 14, of the kidnappers. He dreams of one day reuniting with his sister.<\/p>\n

While his parents searched the neighbourhood, the kidnappers were meeting with the owners of Malaysian Social Services (MSS), an orphanage and adoption agency.<\/p>\n

Police records indicate that the orphanage admitted Zabeen under the name Suji and claimed that her mother had abandoned her and another child.<\/p>\n

“The documents were obviously forged,” says D. Geetha, a lawyer with the Human Rights Law Network who is representing Zabeen’s family. “The woman who signed it wasn’t a relative, it was her kidnapper.”<\/p>\n

According to court documents, the kidnappers sold the children for 10,000 rupees ($280) each. Since 1991, the agency has sent almost 300 children abroad to Australia, the Netherlands and the United States.<\/p>\n

The orphanage charged high fees disguised as donations to manage the international adoptions and collected almost $250,000 for the children. Zabeen was sent to Queensland under her new name.<\/p>\n

“They took my child because she was beautiful,” says Fatima.<\/p>\n

Conventional Indian orphanages are often overcrowded, and one view is that genuine orphans may not be as attractive to foreigners as healthy children raised in their parents’ homes.<\/p>\n

For Fatima, the next five years were the stuff of nightmares. She and her husband, Salia, filed a report with the local police, but were discouraged by the response.<\/p>\n

“They barely looked at the report, it wasn’t a priority for them. There were no detectives, nothing,” says Salia.<\/p>\n

Instead, the couple bankrupted themselves financing their own investigation. They stopped working and spent their days scouring the city asking everyone they met for news of their daughter.<\/p>\n

Then, in 2005, as news reports of adoption scandals rolled across India, a police officer asked Salia to pick out Zabeen from a list of photos of young children. He identified his daughter immediately.<\/p>\n

The police officer told him that his daughter was safe in Australia, but that it would be difficult to bring her back. “Every day I searched the streets for some sign of her. I had gone mad. But once the police told me that she was okay, I began to feel better. I could sleep again,” says Fatima.<\/p>\n

Now after almost 10 years, what they want most is news of their child.<\/p>\n

“If I could only see her and know that she is in a good place, getting a good education that is enough for me. She can stay in Australia but we should still give her a choice to come back to her family,” says Fatima.
\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source: Stolen child “ok to stay in Queensland\u00a0 Scott Carney, August 30, 2008 November 11th, 1998, was like any other day in Chennai: hot and humid. Fatima, a young housewife with three children left her house for a grocery run across the street while two of her children, Zabeen, 2, and Sadaam Hussein, 4, played… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,38],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2014"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2015,"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2014\/revisions\/2015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/old.againstchildtrafficking.org\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}