Police nab 50 cross-border bride traffickers

0 Comment(s)Print E-mail Shanghai Daily, January 8, 2013
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Police in China said they caught 50 suspects and rescued 18 women during an investigation last year into a cross-border human trafficking ring headed by Vietnamese, according to media reports yesterday.

The women, 17 from Vietnam and one from adjoining Yunnan Province were aged between 17 and 30. They were either lured by promises of high pay or kidnapped in Vietnam and smuggled across the border into China, police said.

Ring members asked villagers in Qiubei County in Yunnan to "adopt" them as daughters, helping them register the women illegally. They then sold the women to bachelors in poverty-stricken areas in northwest China's Gansu Province, the provincial Lanzhou Morning Post reported yesterday.

The ring came to light when a villager in Wenxian County in Gansu reported to police he spent more than 90,000 yuan (US$14,450) buying a wife last February, only to have her leave a month later.

He told police he felt cheated by the middleman. Police said nine of the ring members were from Gansu.

Police found several rural families in Gansu had Vietnamese wives who told them they had been trussed up in bags, beaten with sticks and smuggled to Yunnan, according to the newspaper.

They also told police that three Yunnan natives, surnamed Wang, Zhu and Lu, sold them to middlemen in Gansu.

With the help of Yunnan police, Gansu police caught Zhu on June 30, 2012. They said Zhu confessed he conspired with others to sell more than 10 Vietnamese women, but he refused to give details, the newspaper reported.

After months of investigation, police have caught the 50 suspects in Yunnan, Gansu and Beijing and rescued 18 women. Police said most of the abducted women are not well educated. Also, they don't speak Chinese and are unfamiliar with their new environment, which police said made it more difficult to collect evidence and find and arrest suspects.

In poor, remote mountainous areas, it is not rare for desperate bachelors to buy wives from poorer regions, especially Vietnam, because local women are reluctant to marry them.

Though international marriage agencies selling brides are illegal even when the women are willing, loopholes in China have allowed the industry to flourish, according to Xinhua news agency.

For a "group" price of 30,000 to 40,000 yuan, an attractive Vietnamese bride aged between 18 and 25 can be bought from a marriage agency based in Yunnan that regularly posts online advertisements, Xinhua said.

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