Police officers are attempting to figure out how a 42-year-old man fell for his wife's fake nine-month pregnancy and staged birth of a son.
The Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) on Friday, January 22, said that they had arrested Bella Ogolla who stole a baby at a salon in Rodi Kopany in Homabay County on Thursday, January 7.
They had also reunited the one-month-old boy, Baby Stanley Decimal, with her biological mother, Benta Achieng.
"Shockingly, the suspect had met the baby's real mother in hospital days before she delivered, only to steal the baby later.
"We are still trying to figure out how she managed to convince her husband, Bernard Akello, that she was pregnant all along and had finally given birth to ‘their son’," DCI said in a statement.
The detectives added that the rescue was made possible after detectives from the Crime Research and Intelligence Bureau (Nairobi) collaborated with their Homabay counterparts and officers from the Child Protection Unit.
The baby's biological mother, Benta Achieng reported the case to the detectives and claimed that she met Ogolla at St. Lawrence Hospital in December 2020.
The suspect was visiting her own patient and asked for Benta's contacts, saying that she wanted to be friends and to also follow up on the progress of the newborn.
The two met at a salon a few days later and the suspect offered to babysit the infant as the mother was being attended to. She later walked out with the baby claiming that the blow drier's smoke was affecting the boy, only to vanish.
In November 2020, a documentary by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC Africa) exposed child trafficking in Kenya.
The international media infiltrated the trafficking ring that thrives on snatching babies from their mothers and selling them for as little as Ksh 43,000.
Police arrested seven Kenyans, two hospital administrators, a nurse and a social worker included, who were linked to the underworld ring.
