A nine-year-old Afghan girl who was abducted by smugglers trying to get her into the Middle East was found after a report on CNN.
Leila Asafiya, originally from Afghanistan’s war-torn Jalalabad, sold for as little as $1 to traffickers in Uzbekistan who promised her safe passage to the United Arab Emirates.
The border patrol discovered the girl Tuesday while they were searching two suitcases after noticing several people in distress at the border crossing in Almaty, Kazakhstan. The two suitcases containing the girl were later found near a town in Uzbekistan, the WorldPost reported.
“This is our first instance where a child trafficking case has been revealed on our border,” Emin Akbarpov, the Customs official who found the girl, told Kazakh newspaper Rustavi-24. “But I haven’t seen anything like this before.”
“That’s what’s wrong with the world,” Ahmet Yildirim, Iran’s interior minister, told BBC on Monday, referring to the incident. “Kidnapping children … in order to extract their organs for a tissue transplant.”
According to CNN, Asafiya is now in the hands of the Uzbekistan authorities.
Uzbek authorities said the baby boy and baby girl had been given to Asafiya for marriage, despite her parents being able to identify her only by her eyes. She is now living with her parents.
The smuggler was “devoted” to Asafiya, CNN reported, and was well-known to investigators in the small town.
A series of daily television reports were aired in Afghanistan on Wednesday night about Asafiya.
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