A court here on Tuesday sent Jalpaiguri District Child Protection Officer (DCPO) Sasmita Ghosh, arrested for her alleged involvement in the child trafficking racket in the district, to seven days CID custody, an official said.
Ghosh, arrested on Monday, was the seventh person arrested by the CID sleuths in the sensational child trafficking case with an international footprint.
"Ghosh has been remanded to CID custody for seven days by the Jalpaiguri Chief Judicial Magistrate Court on Tuesday. She is now shifted to Siliguri for further interrogation," said a senior CID official.
"She has authenticated all 17 cases of child trafficking in the name of adoption by producing manufactured documents and signing on them. Thus she has misused the government machinery. We will investigate if she took any commission for doing the job," he added.
According to sources, Ghosh told the court that she helped the traffickers under the instruction of "higher authority" and demanded to arrest the others involved in the case.
The CID sleuths earlier arrested six people - ex-Darjeeling DCPO Mrinal Ghosh, Darjeeling Child Welfare Committee member Debasis Chanda, BJP women wing leader Juhi Chowdhury, Chandana Chakraborty, the chairperson of the accused child adoption centre, Chief Adoption Officer Sonali Mondal and Chakraborty's aide Manas Bhowmik - in the last two weeks for selling at least 17 children through shady adoption deals.
--IANS
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