Infant sold for GH¢35,000, six nabbed as Police smash child trafficking ring in Kasoa
A police operation that began with a single missing child report has unravelled an alleged child trafficking network, landing six people in custody and freeing three young victims — among them a baby of just ten months who had been sold to buyers in the Ashanti Region.
The chain of events was set in motion on April 10, 2026, when a woman walked into the Kasoa Divisional Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit to report that her seven-year-old niece, Kadija Karim, had vanished while playing outside in the neighbourhood.
What followed was an investigation that would expose a web of deception stretching far beyond a single disappearance.
Kadija resurfaced the very next day, and when officers questioned her, she allegedly revealed that two women — Janet Larbie and Seikena Umar — had coaxed her away with promises of taking her to see her biological mother.
Instead, she was transported to an unfamiliar location and left in the care of a woman she did not know, before being bundled into a taxi back to Kasoa on April 11 and warned to keep quiet about everything she had witnessed.
That testimony gave investigators a thread to pull.
Larbie was taken into custody, and as the probe deepened, Mary Dotsey, Yvonne Twumasi and Seikena Umar were also rounded up for their alleged roles in the scheme.
Detectives established that the operation was allegedly masterminded and bankrolled by a woman named Lucinda Naomi Otchere, who remains at large along with two other accomplices identified as Adjeiwaa and Hawa.
The investigation also unearthed a separate but related case involving a mother whose two children — aged ten months and five years — had been taken away by individuals who posed as caregivers.
The infant, it emerged, had been ferried to Asuofua Mampong in the Ashanti Region and exchanged for GH¢35,000.
The buyers, Grace Osei Afriyie, 71, and Regina Agyeiwaa, 57, were tracked down and arrested on April 28, 2026 — Afriyie at Asokore Mampong and Agyeiwaa at Suame — with the baby still in their possession.
The child has since been returned to her family.
In total, six individuals have been apprehended: Grace Osei Afriyie, Regina Agyeiwaa, Janet Larbie, Mary Dotsey, Yvonne Twumasi, and Seikena Umar, ranging in age from 32 to 71.
The Ofaakor Circuit Court has placed Larbie, Dotsey, Twumasi and Umar on remand, while Afriyie has been released on bail. Agyeiwaa remains in detention by order of the Akweley Magistrate Court.
The Central East Regional Police Command says the pursuit of those still on the run is actively underway, and has singled out the Kasoa DOVVSU for praise in helping bring the syndicate to light.
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