Hyderabad police have uncovered an illegal child trafficking network and arrested 11 people involved in the crime. The operation was conducted by the Rachakonda Special Operation Teams (SOT) from Malkajgiri and Chaitanyapuri Police. During the raid, officers rescued four infants from the traffickers.
The arrested individuals include Kola Krishnaveni, Battu Deepthi, Goutham Savithri Devi, Battu Sravan Kumar, Amgoth Sharada, and Budidhi Sampath Kumar, who worked as an outsourcing ward boy at Gandhi Hospital. Additionally, police arrested those who purchased the infants: Oguti Naga Venkata Pavan Bhagavan and his wife, Teppala Vinay Kumar and his wife Teppala Swathi, and Lingala Ramesh.
According to the police, Krishnaveni had been divorced because she was unable to conceive. In her search for a child, she turned to social media and came in contact with a man named Manoj from Delhi in 2024. Manoj promised to sell her a baby boy for ₹5 lakh and brought the child to Hyderabad. However, before the transaction could take place, the Gopalapuram Police arrested them.
Krishnaveni continued to seek infants through her friend Deepthi and an associate named Sampath. She later connected with Vandana from Ahmedabad, Gujarat, who agreed to send infants to Hyderabad for ₹1.5 lakh per baby girl and ₹2.5 lakh per baby boy. Vandana, with help from Sunitha and Savitri Devi, sent two baby boys and two baby girls from Gujarat.
Once the infants arrived, Krishnaveni, Deepthi, and Sampath worked with mediators such as Sharada, Umarani, Jayasree, Sravan, and Soni Keerthi to sell the babies in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. They sold baby girls for ₹2-3 lakh each and baby boys for ₹4-5 lakh each, splitting the money among themselves.
On Tuesday, the Malkajgiri SOT team and Chaitanyapuri Police acted on a tip-off and rushed to Chaitanyapuri bus stop. There, they found Krishnaveni, Savitri Devi, and Sampath Kumar with a baby boy under suspicious circumstances. The police immediately apprehended them, leading to the busting of the child trafficking network.
