New details in the case of nine children in Mali who allege they were fraudulently adopted in France in the 1990s suggest French authorities were aware of wrongdoings at the time and failed to act, journalist Morgane Le Cam told RFI.
A journalist with Le Monde daily, Le Cam has spent five years investigating the so-called "stolen children" affair concerning one of France's largest approved adoption agencies.
In 2020, nine French citizens adopted as children in Mali in the 1990s, filed a complaint against the NGO Rayon de Soleil (RDSEE). They accused it of deliberately lying to both biological and adoptive parents to facilitate their adoption.
Le Cam's investigation, published in Le Monde this week, comes two months after the Paris tribunal agreed to investigate RDSEE for fraud and breach of trust.
RDSEE held a "double discourse", Le Cam told RFI, "deceiving both the adoptive parents in France and the biological families, especially in Mali".
The non-profit told biological families their children would go to France temporarily, for example to study, but would return.
Meanwhile adoptive parents in France were told the infants were either voluntarily and definitively abandoned by their parents or passed off as orphans when they were not.
Some of the nine plaintiffs have traced their biological families in Mali and each claims they were tricked into giving up their children.
tags: