Tourists strolling on glitzy Pařížská street witnessed a dramatic sight that afternoon, as police restrained a man, knocked him down and arrested him. His two accomplices were picked up later in Cheb, west Bohemia.

They are suspected of trying to sell a 10-month-old girl for 100,000 euros ($127,000/2.8 million Kč) to customers in the United Kingdom.

Thus ended Operation Alenka, as police call the case, with three suspects — among them the girl's father — facing up to eight years in prison if convicted. Police have not released the names of the accused pending formal charging.

In the past decade, police uncovered cases of this kind roughly every couple years. In 2004 alone, however, they arrested five people on child trafficking charges.

Pavla Gomba, director of the Czech Fund for UNICEF, says the actual number of children sold abroad is probably much higher. "About 10 people in the past six years informed us directly about cases of child trafficking," she said. "Either they knew about a situation or were directly offered a baby for sale."

Operation Alenka

In April, British detectives spotted a suspicious advertisement, apparently with Czech contact details, for a "baby girl, including her papers" and informed their Czech counterparts. It took four months for police to investigate the case and find the suspects, but in the end they tracked them down without putting the child in danger.

The police set up one of the men by making an undercover offer of an advance payment for a child. When the man turned up to collect at the meeting point, next to the Hotel InterContinental in Old Town, they immediately arrested him.

"The police acted quickly to prevent the sale," Blanka Kosinová, spokesperson for the Police Organized Crime Squad (ÚOOZ) told the press. "The health of the child was not compromised."

The infant remains at home, with her mother, police say, where she has remained throughout Operation Alenka. Whether she will remain there is another question. For now, social workers have left the girl with her mother, who claims she knew nothing of the transaction and has not been charged.

But police also say they found a forged birth certificate at the home. Detectives are now investigating whether the alleged trafficking attempt was an isolated incident. The father, meanwhile, told police he never intended to sell his daughter and instead wanted to con the buyers out of their money.

Pricing a child

According to UNICEF, out of the estimated 1.2 million children who are trafficked worldwide each year only a fraction are sold for "illegal adoption," which is considered one of the mildest versions of child trafficking.

The rest of them are used for forced labor, prostitution, organ donation or various rituals. Prices can range from a few coins to hundreds of thousands of euros.

Critics say illegal adoption is a logical outgrowth of the lengthy, bureaucratic adoption process. In the Czech Republic, only the state can provide a legal adoption service and it provides it free of charge, but only after months of processing, says Alena Vávrová, a social worker at the Center for Alternative Family Care.

"It is not legal to pay for [adopting] children," she says.