A baby-selling group made up of doctors, nurses and welfare workers has gone on trial in Vietnam for selling more than 250 children for adoption, reports Sky News.

The sixteen defendants allegedly solicited infants from unmarried mothers and desperately poor families and created false documents claiming the babies had been abandoned. This made them eligible for adoption.

The defendants are accused of sending 266 babies for foreign adoption between 2005 and 2008, but the nationality of the adoptive parents is unknown.

They are said to have earned up to £338 each and face up to 10 years in prison if found guilty.

America is one of Vietnam’s largest recipients of adopted children, but the two countries have yet to renew an adoption agreement, which expired earlier this month. In April last year, the US embassy said in a report that Vietnam had failed to police its adoption system, allowing corruption, fraud and baby-selling to flourish.