Leads Magistrate Court
The UK police have nabbed a Nigerian woman at Gatwick Airport after she arrived in the country with a very young baby girl believed not to be her child.
The woman has been tagged Susan, while the child is identified as Eleanor. Both names are pseudonyms.
According to a BBC report published on Monday, Susan had been living in West Yorkshire with her husband and children since June 2023.
Before travelling to Nigeria in early June 2024, she had told her doctor in the UK that she was pregnant and wanted to give birth to her baby in her home country.
Advertisement
However, scans and blood tests showed that it was not the case. Instead, they revealed Susan had a tumour, which doctors feared could be cancerous. But she refused treatment.
Susan said her previous pregnancies had been invisible on scans, telling her employer, “My babies are always hidden”.
She also claimed she had been pregnant for up to 30 months with her other children.
Advertisement
When she arrived in Nigeria, she later contacted her local hospital in Britain to say she had given birth.
Sussex Police arrested Susan when she returned to the UK with Eleanor after doctors contacted child services out of concern.
After her arrest, Susan, her husband, and Eleanor were given DNA tests while the child was taken to foster carers.
DNA tests conducted after she arrived showed the baby had no genetic link with Susan or her husband.
Advertisement
Susan demanded a second test, which gave the same result, and then she changed her story.
She blamed the negative DNA test results on an “IVF treatment” with a donor egg and sperm before moving to Britain in 2023.
Susan provided a letter from a Nigerian hospital, signed by the medical director, saying she had given birth there, as well as a document from another clinic about the IVF treatment to back up her claims.
She also provided photos and videos, which she said showed her in the hospital’s labour suite.
Advertisement
In the photo, no face was visible, and one showed a naked woman with a placenta between her legs, with an umbilical cord still attached to it.
INVESTIGATION REVEALS LINK TO ‘BABY FACTORY’
Advertisement
The family court in Leeds sent Henrietta Coker, a social worker with nearly 30 years of experience, to Nigeria for investigations.
Coker visited the medical centre where Susan claimed she had IVF, but there was no record of Susan having a treatment there. Staff told the investigator that the letter was forged.
Advertisement
Coker then visited the place where Susan said she had given birth.
She noted that it was a shabby, three-bedroom flat, with stained walls and dirty carpets.
Advertisement
Coker said she was met by three young teenage girls sitting in the reception room with nurses’ uniforms on.
She asked to speak to the matron and was “ushered into the kitchen where a teenage girl was eating rice”.
Coker then tracked down the doctor who allegedly wrote the letter attesting that Susan had given birth there.
He confirmed that “someone had given birth”, but shook his head negatively when Coker asked him if Susan was the patient after showing him a picture.
“Impersonating people is common in this part of the world,” the doctor was quoted to have told Coker, suggesting that Susan might have “bought the baby”.
Coker was unable to establish who Eleanor’s real parents were or where she might have come from. The doctor told her he believed the baby would have been given up voluntarily.
The investigator gave evidence to the court in Leeds in March this year, along with Susan, her husband, her employer, and a senior obstetrician.
At an earlier hearing, the judge asked for Susan’s phone to be examined.
Investigators found messages that Susan had sent to someone saved in her contacts as “Mum oft [sic] Lagos Baby”.
About four weeks before the alleged date of birth, Susan wrote a text message which read: “Good afternoon ma, I have not seen the hospital items.”
The same day, Mum oft Lagos Baby responded: “Delivery drug is 3.4 m. Hospital bill 170k.”
The local authority pointed out that the messages were set to “automatic self-destruct mode” and said they represented evidence of a deal to purchase a baby.
Susan tried to explain the messages in court, but the deputy judge of the high court said her attempts were “difficult to follow and impossible to accept”.
ELEANOR TAKEN AWAY
The deputy judge said Susan and her husband had put forward a “fundamental lie” to explain how Eleanor came to be in their care, and had tried to mislead authorities with false documents, causing the little girl “significant emotional and psychological harm”.
Susan and her husband said they wanted Eleanor returned to them, describing her as “a fundamental part of their family unit”.
But the judge ordered that Eleanor be placed for adoption, and made a “declaration of non-parentage”.
When Eleanor is adopted, she will have a new identity and British nationality.
In April, officers of the UK Border Force intercepted a Nigerian couple who attempted to bring in a baby that was not biologically theirs.
The baby was identified as Lucy.
The Nigerian High Commission was accused of ignoring requests to comment on the reports of Lucy and Eleanor’s cases.
