LAGOS, Nigeria — Police found dozens of exhausted children — some as young as 1 and none older than 14 — packed into a truck during a routine search in Nigeria's capital, and a suspected child-trafficker claimed their parents consented to hiring them out as servants, authorities said yesterday.

The suspect, Fatima Baba, told police she brought the 52 children from Nigeria's Niger state to hire them out as domestic servants, Lagos state police spokesman Ademola Adebayo said.

Child-trafficking is an Africa-wide problem, and a police spokesman said authorities were investigating whether there were plans to sell some children into slavery.

"According to her, she would get a fee for hiring out the children," Adebayo said, adding that police were checking Baba's claim that the children's families had agreed to the arrangement and would be paid when the children returned after a year's work.

The youngsters sat on wooden benches yesterday in a concrete room at an inner-city police station in Lagos, Nigeria's largest city. Several had no clothes; others wrapped themselves in soiled lengths of cloth.

Five of the children were between the ages of 1 and 5. Officials said they were working to reunite the children with relatives. Charges against Baba and the driver were pending, police officials said. Twelve adults who shared the container with the children also were detained, Adebayo said.

An estimated 200,000 children are shipped across West and Central Africa's borders each year, some ending up in brutally difficult jobs.

Police arrested four child-traffickers in Nigeria last month for selling babies for $1,800, police officials said. Two local hospitals helped in the crime, arranging for infants to be adopted before they were even born, Adebayo said.

The chief suspect, female pastor Faith John, was operating out of the Good Shepherd Orphanage in Lagos, where police found at least 10 girls being held against their will and a dozen babies, Nigerian police spokesman Emmanuel Ighodalo said from Abuja.

The cremated remains of an unspecified number of babies also were found in the orphanage, Ighodalo said.

Citing John's confessions, he said the girls — six of whom were pregnant — had all been enticed there with offers of about $180.

Authorities say they are investigating whether the woman and the three other suspects — including her husband and daughter — also were trafficking in human body parts through the orphanage.

Human body parts are illegally used in rituals in Nigeria by people who believe they provide protection or power.