JAKARTA — Indonesian prosecutors charged 19 people on Tuesday for their alleged roles in buying babies from new parents and selling them at a profit to clients at home and abroad in what the authorities described as one of Indonesia’s largest trafficking cases in recent years. Earlier, the defendants, 18 of them women, filed into the Bandung District Court in west Java province in a single line, dressed in white shirts and orange detainee vests. Several of them lowered their heads or shielded their faces from cameras outside. They were formally charged during the court appearance. If found guilty, they could face up to 15 years in prison under Indonesian laws governing human trafficking and child protection, officials said. The defendants were arrested last year after a parent reported an alleged baby kidnapping to police in West Java.At the center of the case is Lie Siu Luan, 70, known as Lily, whom police investigators described as the ringleader. She was arrested in July 2025 at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport upon returning from Singapore, according to reports. The case is spread across nine indictments involving the 19 defendants. Investigators tracked down a suspect who allegedly confessed to having traded more than two dozen infants, some as young as three months old. They were bought from people who did not want or could not afford to keep their babies.The person who reported the kidnapping had actually entered into an agreement with the syndicate but never got paid, police said. “Most of those babies were trafficked to Singapore,” prosecutor Sukanda — who like many Indonesians has only one name — told the court on Tuesday. Police rescued several infants held by the syndicate in Indonesia, before they could be sold.Others, rejected by would-be clients in Singapore, had already been sold domestically, including to adoptive parents in the capital Jakarta. Dr Sendi Sanjaya, a lawyer representing the ring leader Lie, said prosecutors had brought the charges based on allegations of baby abduction, but he rejected the claims as inaccurate, arguing that the cases involved the consent of the babies’ parents. “We do not want anyone to be punished for something she did not do,” Dr Sanjaya said after the hearing on Tuesday. He said Lie had acted in good faith, intending to place the babies with higher-income families. He added that the defence would present evidence to support this during the trial, which he expects to last between three and six months. Police said the syndicate had started operating in 2023 and had sent at least 14 babies to Singapore. The defendants allegedly played distinct roles: some were assigned to find babies, some to care for them, and others to prepare identity documents and passports. One of the women told prosecutors she had procured 34 children for the group. Human trafficking is a recurring problem in Indonesia, a sprawling nation of more than 17,000 islands. — Agencies
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