KARACHI, March 15: Police recovered 11 kidnapped children, four boys and seven girls, whose ages ranged from two months to three years, from a bungalow in Gulshan-i-Iqbal on Friday and arrested five women and three men.

A senior police officer said police raided a spotted bungalow, No A-29, in Block 13-D in Gulshan-i-Iqbal after they received information about the presence of kidnapped children. Police found 11 children, and five women and three men there. The latter had been taken into custody. The children were about to be smuggled out of the country.

The children were sent to the Edhi Child Home in Mithadar.

Those arrested have been identified as Dennis Chance, Derrick Chance, their mother, Joyce Chance; Joseph Aziz, and four nannies, Shazia, Nasreen, Parveen and Zeenat.

The sources said carriers of six children had been arrested in 1998 by the FIA immigration at the Quaid-i-Azam International Airport. Dennis Chance had appeared in court and claimed to be father of those six children. The court asked him to prove his contention, but he had not turned up at the court since.

The city police chief, Asad Jehangir, said: “We have come to know that suspects/accused had been arrested in 1998, and we are investigating into it.”

Faisal Edhi of the Edhi Foundation said the 11 children had been lodged at the Edhi Child Home in Mithadar and parents of none of these had contacted them so far.

He said six babies had been recovered in 1998, and they were sent to the Edhi Child Home. Five of the children were still in the Child Home and one of them had been adopted by a childless couple. He said none of the parents of the six children had, so far, contacted the Edhi Foundation.

He said in the majority of such cases children were bought from poverty- stricken parents, and if their children were recovered, they did not want to claim them for fear of arrest or interrogation.

“We are not hopeful that the parents of these 11 children will contact us after the news appears in the press. However, I appeal to the parents of a two-month-old girl to contact us as she is not having milk as she might be on breast-feeding. She is crying and keeps fainting. She is not drinking even water, or anything else. If she will not have milk, she may die”, a worried Faisal Edhi said.

During initial investigation, the suspects told police that poverty-stricken people or those who had illegitimate child dropped their child outside churches. They gave them to childless couples abroad, the suspects added.

Another senior police officer said these children might have been kidnapped in hospitals in the city and were about to be smuggled to Malta.

Derrick Chance’s wife was in Malta and she had sent adoption papers, carrying stamps of attestation from Malta’s foreign office.

Police also recovered 13 passports from the possession of the suspects, which were issued from Hyderabad. Fake birth certificates had also been recovered, police said.

Police said the children were to be smuggled to Malta, where one child was to be sold for 20,000-30,000 US dollars (Rs1.2-Rs1.8 million).

DIG Investigation Fayyaz Leghari said: “We do not have any case about disappearance or kidnapping of children at any of the police stations in the city.”

Asked about the possibility of parents approaching police but the latter refusing to register cases, the city police chief ruled out this possibility and said: “We always take up this matter seriously, and no case about kidnapping or disappearance of children has been registered.”