A WOMAN who tried to pass off a baby as hers in order to bring it to Britain from Nigeria has been handed a suspended jail term.

Rose Oviebo, 48, of Essex Road, Willesden, was sentenced at Harrow Crown Court on Friday following a successful investigation by the anti-child trafficking Operation Paladin team comprising police officers and immigration officers.

The court heard that in 2008 the defendant travelled to Nigeria in west Africa and visited a “traditional herbal clinic” where she was told for a fee of around 200,000 Nigerian Nira, approximate to £1,000, she would be provided with medicine to make her fall pregnant.

She bought the treatment and returned to the UK where she dissolved the treatment with water and drank it.

Oviebo returned to Nigeria on a number of subsequent occasions, the last of which was in May 2010. Five days after her arrival she claimed to give birth at the same clinic to a baby boy.

On June 16 Oviebo attended the British High Commission in the Nigerian capital of Abuja where she attempted to apply for a passport for the child.

She was unable to provide any antenatal or medical notes to verify parentage but instead handed to officials a CD on which were staged photographs purporting to show the defendant in labour, the delivery and the immediate aftermath.

Suspicious commission staff requested DNA maternity tests and while the results were awaited Oviebo left the child in the care of relatives and returned to the UK.

The tests proved there was no blood relationship between Oviebo and the child. She disputed the result and insisted on a second test that similarly proved negative, and she was later arrested and charged.

Obviebo admitted at Harrow Crown Court on July 15 one count of doing an act to facilitate the commission of a breach of UK immigration law by a non EU person in that between May 8 2010 and May 8 2012 she applied for a UK passport for a child that was not her biological child. On Friday she was sentenced to 12 months' jail, suspended for 12 months.

A 69-year-old man arrested in connection with the investigation was later released no further action.