Babies for sale: Bulgarian Roma fuel illegal adoption trade

Over the past 15 years, the sale of babies in Bulgaria's poor Roma communities has become almost commonplace. With help from traffickers, destitute parents are selling their newborns in neighbouring Greece, where adoption laws are lax.

Grinding poverty among this often oppressed minority fuels the trend, and the "explanations" given by the bereft mothers fool few.

"Iliyana left for Greece pregnant. She came back a week ago, without the belly and without the baby, saying that it died at birth in Greece," whispered a woman in the run-down southeastern village of Ekzarh Antimovo.

"It is the third baby that she has sold," she added, with a knowing glance.

The village is not far from the city of Burgas in the province of the same name, where the trade started in Roma ghettos at the turn of the century. It has spread to other regions, including the eastern cities of Varna, Aytos and Karnobat, Sliven to the southeast, and Kazanlak in central Bulgaria.

In 2015 alone, Burgas prosecutors probed 27 cases of trafficking of 31 pregnant women to Greece and the sale of 33 babies.

Another mother from the same village as Iliyana is currently facing charges for selling a baby boy in Greece.

"I am not who you are looking for," the plump young woman snapped after AFP knocked on her door.

With its new window panes, her whitewashed house looks decent compared to the neighbouring wooden shacks, where large families are often forced to sleep on the ground.

"Ninety-seven percent of the locals are illiterate," sighed the Roma mayor of Ekzarh Antimovo, Sashko Ivanov.

The sale of babies remains "an isolated phenomenon that occurs among the most marginalised," he said. "Babies were and will be sold because the misery is profound".