Police in Vietnam announced Wednesday they had initiated legal proceedings against two local women who brought mothers to China in order to sell their infants.

Moong Thi Ly and Moong Thi Oanh, residents of Nghe An Province, are being investigated for “making arrangements for people to arrive in a foreign country illegally.”

The duo, both 32, are not being detained because they are pregnant.

In September 2018, Oanh asked Ly to find pregnant women to be taken to China and promised to give her some profit for every successful baby sale, case records show.

Oanh and Ly found several women from four to eight weeks pregnant and then unlawfully took them to China.

While Oanh was carrying the expectant mothers to hospital for a pregnancy test in the Chinese province of Hebei in late September, one of them died in a car crash.

One of the surviving mothers gave birth to a boy the following month, according to the case records.

She and her baby were brought back to Vietnam as part of a cooperative effort of the Vietnamese police and the Hanoi-headquartered non-governmental organization Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation in late January this year.

Oanh and Ly were placed under investigation nearly one month after their activities were discovered.

Police said 25 pregnant women from an ethnic community in Nghe An had been illegally transported to China to sell their children up until November 2018, and six of them were confirmed to have sold their newborns for VND80-140 million (US$3,440-6,020).

Not all of those cases were arranged by Ly and Oanh, however.

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