Police have arrested a number of suspected child traffickers in northern Ghana over the past few days, according to various reports.

One man and a woman were handed over to Ghanaian authorities at the border locality of Paga by their Burkinabe counterparts after being caught in Burkina Faso in late March with 14 children aged 10 to 18 years, a researcher on child trafficking who was in Burkina Faso at the time told IRIN.

The group was on its way to The Gambia where the children were to have worked for fishermen. The source said a third man caught with false identification documents was still in detention in Burkina Faso when she left that country on 28 March.

According to a BBC report, another man was caught with six children whom he claimed to be taking to work on his orange farm in the centre of the country. He said he had taken the children from a village in the Upper West region with the consent of their parents.

According to the BBC, the traffickers were taken to the police station in the main town in the north, Bolgatanga. A BBC reporter said on Tuesday that police used teargas to disperse hundreds of people who turned up at the station.