HONG KONG, Sept 27, 2007 (AFP) - Lucky fat ladies, porcelain pigs, ceramic musicians and giant Buddhas are crammed into Hong Kong's antique boutiques, but some experts, backed by Chinese law, say many of them shouldn't be here at all.

By a curious twist of history and geopolitics, Hong Kong has become the legitimate outlet for ill-gotten treasures of Chinese history, a legal market for illegally obtained objets d'art that can and do command huge sums.

KUWAIT CITY, Sept 26, 2007 (AFP) - A senior US human rights official on Wednesday criticised laws in the oil-rich Gulf states that restrict migrant workers under a system that some campaigners say is akin to slave labour.

Mark Lagon, director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, said during a visit to Kuwait that the so-called sponsorship laws restrict the choice of migrant workers and their control over their own lives.

LONDON, Sept 23, 2007 (AFP) - Criminal gangs are trafficking hundreds of children into Britain and forcing them to work in cannabis factories, with at least one child per week being found by police, a report said Sunday.

Campaign group End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and the Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (ECPAT) said there had been a five-fold increase in the practice in the last year alone.

PRAGUE, Sept 20, 2007 (AFP) - Czech police said Thursday they had arrested 14 people including two Chinese nationals and 11 Vietnamese in raids on a gang accused of people-smuggling from Asia.

A 32-year-old Chinese man detained in Tuesday's busts in the north of the country, Prague and the Czech Republic's second city of Brno was thought to be the network's main operative in the country, police said.

PHNOM PENH, Sept 15, 2007 (AFP) - High demand for virgins from mostly Asian clients is fueling the flow of underage girls into Cambodia's sex trade, the International Organization for Migration has said in a report.

About 38 percent of the women and girls surveyed working in the sex trade here entered the industry by selling their virginity, IOM found, while 85 percent of the clients paying to sleep with them were Asian men.

SHINBIVALE BEACH, Somalia, Sept 13, 2007 (AFP) - As darkness casts its pall on Shinbivale beach, dozens of famished migrants emerge cautiously from cliff caves and start scrambling down towards the smuggling boats awaiting them.

They have come from all over East Africa to this remote creek near Bosaso, the economic capital of Somalia's autonomous region of Puntland, to earn a chance at 'tahrib,' the Arabic word for smuggling.

GENEVA, Sept 7, 2007 (AFP) - NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer on Friday said the Afghan government and international aid agencies needed to do more to stifle the country's burgeoning illicit heroin exports.

'NATO has not prime or even secondary responsibility, the international community -- first and foremost the Afghan government -- they should absolutely do more and be more active in the poppy fields than they are at the moment, they are primarily responsible,' he said.

BEIJING, Sept 7, 2007 (AFP) - Chinese police have busted a baby trafficking ring that has seen dozens of people accused of buying and selling at least 40 infants, state press reported Friday.

So far 47 baby trafficking gang members in southwestern China's Yunnan province and 10 others in Shandong to the east have been arrested for their involvement in the trade, the Beijing News said.

The gang was accused of gathering the babies in Gejiu area of Yunnan and trafficking them to areas around Shandong's Tancheng city, both rural regions, it said.

TEHRAN, Sept 5, 2007 (AFP) - Iran has arrested 25 members of a gang that trafficked 100 women from Central Asia to the Gulf countries, a police commander was quoted as saying on Wednesday.

Iranian police had the gang under surveillance for three months and worked in coordination with the international police agency, Interpol, commander Ahmad Roozbahani from Tehran police told the semi-official Fars news agency.

PRETORIA, Sept 3, 2007 (AFP) - UN agencies urged governments in southern Africa on Monday to draw up legislation to combat frightening levels of human trafficking, saying action was vital ahead of the upcoming football World Cup.

'None of the countries in southern Africa has specific anti-human trafficking legislation in place,' Thomas Zindl-Cronin of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) told reporters in Johannesburg.

Specific legislation to tackle the issue was needed to help the law enforcement agencies get to grips with the situation.

WASHINGTON, Aug 30, 2007 (AFP) - The US Treasury said Thursday it had blacklisted four Colombian men, including twin brothers, who are wanted for alleged drug trafficking.

The move freezes any assets the men may hold under US juridiction and bars US citizens from conducting any commercial transactions with the men.

The government described the men as 'significant Colombian drug traffickers' and named them as Miguel Angel Mejia Munera, Victor Manuel Mejia Munera, Ramiro Vanoy Murillo and Francisco Javier Zuluaga Lindo.

ZAGREB, Aug 21, 2007 (AFP) - Twenty-four illegal immigrants trying to sneak into western Europe have been arrested while attempting to cross Croatia's border with Slovenia, local police said Tuesday.

A group of 20 Albanians and four Serbs were travelling in a van when a police patrol intercepted them near the town of Vrbovsko on Monday, police spokeswoman Mirjana Kulas told HINA news agency.

Eleven of them were minors, said Kulas, adding the Croatian driver of the van was also detained.

GENEVA, Aug 21, 2007 (AFP) - More than half of the 295 women in Moldova who were smuggled abroad last year mainly for prostitution were married mothers, the International Organisation for Migration said Tuesday.

The IOM found in interviews with the victims of trafficking that their 'recruiters' at home in Moldova were often relatives or friends, spokesman Jean-Philippe Chauzy said.

The proportion of married women with children caught up in human trafficking in Moldova increased from 17 percent in 2004 to 55 percent in 2006, according to an IOM report.

WASHINGTON, Aug 17, 2007 (AFP) - A Lithuanian man was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for conspiring to force Eastern European women to work as exotic dancers in Detroit, Michigan strip clubs, the Justice Department said Friday.

'Human trafficking it nothing short of modern-day slavery,' Assistant Attorney General Wan Kim said after the sentence was announced Thursday.

DENPASAR, Indonesia, Aug 15, 2007 (AFP) - Judges have advised Indonesia's Supreme Court to reject a final appeal by three members of an Australian drug smuggling ring against their death sentence, a document showed Wednesday.

Lawyers for Si Yi Chen, Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen and Matthew Norman, on death row for attempting to smuggle heroin from the resort island of Bali, filed a request for a case review to the Supreme Court in June.

RIYADH, Aug 14, 2007 (AFP) - Saudi authorities have foiled several attempts to traffic and merchandise large amounts of drugs across the conservative kingdom, SPA state news agency reported Tuesday.

They seized 282 kilograms (621 pounds) of hashish and nearly 70,000 narcotic pills, said SPA, quoting a statement from the general authority to combat drugs.

The narcotics were seized in several regions, including the capital Riyadh and the western Muslim holy of Mecca, as well as border zones.

MOSCOW, Aug 10, 2007 (AFP) - Russian authorities on Friday announced the seizure of nearly 60 kilograms (132 pounds) of heroin hidden in Coca-Cola bottles coming in from Central Asia.

Moscow police searched a car being driven by a Tajik national in late July, said Mikhail Lamtsov, spokesman for Russia's anti-drug service.

'Forty Coca-Cola bottles, each one-and-a-half litres, were discovered in the trunk,' he said. 'Fifty-seven kilogrammes of heroin were located inside.'

Authorities estimated the value of the drugs at nearly 490,000 euros (670,000 dollars).

BRATISLAVA, Aug 3, 2007 (AFP) - Slovakia's defence minister Friday pledged a far-reaching investigation into allegations that troops returning from a NATO peacekeeping mission in Kosovo smuggled back large amounts of alcohol and cigarettes.

'This case has cast a bad light on soldiers serving in all foreign missions as well as those who conscientiously fulfill their duties at home,' Frantisek Kasicky said at a review of troops in the eastern town of Trebisov.