A woman in the Suntarsky district of the far eastern Sakha republic will go on trial for trying to sell her 5-month-old son through the WhatsApp messaging service, the regional branch of the Investigative Committee said Thursday in an online statement.
Law enforcement officials posing as prospective buyers detained the woman during a supposed swap in which the woman intended to hand them the child in return for 1.5 million rubles ($22,930), the statement said.
The woman earlier on July 2 broke an agreement with prospective adoptive parents when they refused to buy her an apartment in the regional capital Yakutsk and help her pay off a bank loan of 196,000 rubles ($2,990) in exchange for the child.
Her parental rights over the baby have been suspended pending a court case on charges of the attempted sale of an underage person, the statement said.
