Woman jailed for smuggling baby
2008-05-17 09:20
London - A Nigerian-Swedish woman who smuggled a baby from Nigeria to Britain in order to qualify for free housing was jailed for 26 months on Friday.
Police believe Peace Sandberg, 40, paid £150 for the three-month-old boy in her native country.
She then used a forged birth certificate to obtain a visa for the child from the British High Commission in Nigeria.
Within hours of returning to London, Sandberg went to a city council's homeless persons unit, cradling the baby in her arms.
With her dual nationality, she knew that as an European Union citizen working in Britain she would be eligible for a council flat because she had a child.
She claimed she had returned to Africa in 2006 to give birth and now needed somewhere to live for herself and her "son".
But London's Isleworth Crown Court heard in evidence that Sandberg was immediately recognised by a housing assessment officer who recalled she had not been pregnant two months earlier.
Sandberg, who herself worked for the housing department of a different London borough, denied she had broken the law and insisted she had adopted her cousin's orphaned son to give him a better life in Britain.
She was convicted of one count of child trafficking and sentenced to jail. Detective Inspector Gordon Valentine, who heads a specialist people trafficking unit within London's Metropolitan police, said: "This was clearly a case of trafficking.
"Peace Sandberg is a heartless woman. She brought the baby from his home environment for the purpose of her own ends without any regard for the future of that child."
The child's real family in Nigeria has never been traced. He is likely to be adopted and brought up in Britain.
Valentine said: "There is a possibility this child will never know his true identity."
- AFP