A South African woman who tried to sell her 19-month-old son on the internet has been given a five-year suspended sentence.
The woman, 20, will not spend time in jail, but will live under house arrest for three years, a justice official said on Thursday.
The mother, who cannot be named to protect the identity of the child, put him up for sale for 5,000 rand (£230) in an advertisement on Gumtree.
A member of the public alerted the police, and the woman was arrested in an undercover operation in October.
“She was given a wholly suspended sentence of five years,” Natasha Ramkisson-Kara, a spokeswoman for the National Prosecuting Authority, said.
She will “undergo correctional supervision, which means basically house arrest for a period of three years”, Ramkisson-Kara added.
The mother said she had tried selling her baby boy after her boyfriend stopped paying childcare following paternity tests that showed he was not the child’s father.
Human trafficking carries a maximum life jail term or a fine of 100m rand (£4.6m).
The court, sitting in the eastern city of Pietermaritzburg, handed down a lighter sentence after considering the woman’s circumstances.
Ramkisson-Kara said: “The magistrate found that the woman did not have intention per se to traffic the child.”
Source: The Guardian
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