Nigerian Woman Who Bought Baby For N37,000 Jailed In London
By Tayo Lewis - 17.05.2008
IN a bizzare story of
child sale and trafficking, a Nigerian woman, Peace Sandberg, 40, has been sentenced to a prison term of 26 months for trafficking a three month old male child to Britain with the intention of claiming undeserved benefits.
Branded “manipulative, and a stranger to the truth” by the judge, she is believed by police to have paid £150 for the three-month-old boy in Nigeria.
According to a report in the Daily Mail , she had used a forged birth certificate to get a visa for him from the British High Commission there.
Within hours of landing at Heathrow Airport, the fraudster, a former Kensington Housing Trust support worker, who had been living in a hostel, was at Ealing Council’s homeless persons unit, cradling the child in her arms.
She claimed she had returned to Africa in December 2006 to give birth and now needed a flat for herself and her “son”.
But London’s Isleworth Crown Court heard Sandberg was immediately recognised by housing officer, Lizette Reddy, who had earlier seen her in November and who debunked her lie that the baby in her hands could not belong to her since she was not pregnant in November..
She clearly remembered Sandberg - who holds ajoint Nigerian and Swedish nationality - not being pregnant when she saw her two months earlier. Sandberg already had a daughter by her enstrange Swedish husband but the young girl was forced to relocate to her father in Sweden when her mother lost her previous accomodation due to a conflict with the other tenants.
Britain loses over one billion pounds to benefit frauds every year.
