Children for sale

Here's a rather distressing piece of news. What has happened to us? Children being an item to be traded? And for what purposes? I dread to think given the many pedophile gangs there are operating in the world today.

Children for sale: police target gangs - World - smh.com.au

PARIS: Police in France are investigating a trade in children, with babies being offered for sale at more than $15,000 each.

Detectives believe that Eastern European gangs are holding impromptu "auctions" in supermarket car parks across the south of the country and in Portugal.

They chose to release a warning because of the possibility that Madeleine McCann, who vanished in Portugal last month, has been caught up in the trade.

The alert comes as shoppers in a Monaco branch of Carrefour, the international hypermarket chain, reported seeing a four-year-old girl - the same age as Madeleine - escaping abduction.

Her would-be kidnappers were said to have tried to cut off her hair before she fled in tears. When passers-by raised the alarm during the incident, which is believed to have happened last week, the failed abductors escaped in a car with foreign plates.

Details of the most recent attempted sale of a baby are even more definite.

It happened in a hypermarket car park near Angouleme, north of Bordeaux, last month.

Two Romanian couples were arrested trying to sell a two-month-old girl for between €10,000 ($15,900) and €15,000, a police spokesman said.

Telegraph, London