A total of 369 kid trafficking suspects have been seized, and 89 children rescued in two crackdowns in mid July of this year, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) said Wednesday.
Most of the 39 suspects in the first operation were Vietnamese and were captured by local police in Guangdong Province and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region when they tried to traffic eight children as stowaways on ships from Vietnam to China at 2:00 pm on July 15, the MPS said.
On February 20, the Guangxi police learned that children were frequently shipped from Vietnam to China for sale at the Beilun River in Dongxing, Guangxi Province, according the Guangzhou Daily.
Two Vietnamese, “Ah Zhang” and “Ah Lan,” the alleged heads of the trafficking organization, arranged for their subordinates “Xiao Mei” and “Ah Shui” to transport children from Guangxi to Guangdong to be sold.
The aforementioned organizers were seized in Jieyang, Guangdong Province while their accomplices were captured at the Fangcheng Port, according to the report.
The eldest rescued child was only seven months old, while it had only been ten days since the birth of the youngest. The children, who had been given doses of sleeping pills prior to transportation, were taken to local hospitals for treatment, the report said.
Another 330 suspected kid-traffickers, headed by Li Haijun and Huang Shenghua, were captured by 2,600 police from 14 provinces in the joint operation on July 20.
Both cases are currently being tried.
Chen Shiqu, the director of the anti-abduction department of the MPS, told reporters that all rescued children should be accommodated for by the Ministry of Civil Affairs rather than at the homes of their illegal “adopters” until their parents are found via DNA testing.
“All the trafficked kids are to be rescued.,” Liu Ancheng, the deputy director of the Criminal Investigation Bureau of the MPS, was reportedly as saying that.
In all, 39,194 child-trafficking cases have been solved since the MPS launched a specific anti-abduction operation in April 2009. A total of 4,885 criminal gangs were caught, with 14,613 children and 24,826 women rescued.
Global Times