Hebei Provincial Security Bureau on Friday issued a call to parents in east China whose infants have recently gone missing for DNA samples in the hope of identifying the parents of five babies who were found lying in a stolen car on Sunday.

In the early hours of Sunday, traffic police found five newborn babies - three boys and two girls all about 10 days old - on the backseat of a black Santana sedan near the toll gate on Qingdao-Yinchuan Freeway inside Nangong, a county-level city in Hebei Province.

The five babies were taken to the Friendship Hospital of Nangong City, 250 km southwest of Beijing, where the babies were reported to be in good health.

Cao Aiping, deputy director of the bureau, said they had completed DNA tests on the five babies but had so far been unable to identify them.

According to Cao, one couple from Hangzhou City in east China's Zhejiang Province on Tuesday realized that one of the babies looked very similar to their son who was abducted from hospital on May 18.

The couple contacted Cao's bureau and provided their DNA data. But to dismay of the couple, the boy's DNA samples and theirs did not match, according to Cao.

Sunday's Santana car caught the attention of a highway patrol policeman when its driver suddenly switched lanes while waiting to pay a toll. The officer became more suspicious when he noticed the car's trunk was missing a lock and looked as if it had been tampered with.

When the policeman tried to question the driver, he and another man in the passenger seat refused to get out or roll down their windows. A minute later, they suddenly jumped out brandishing knives and ran away.

The two men were said to have escaped into the fields adjacent to the freeway and disappeared. Police gave chase but failed to catch them.

The two men who were suspected of trafficking the five babies are reported to be from Shandong Province, and the police have gone to the province to search for them, according to Cao, who declined to provide further details about the two suspects.

(Xinhua News Agency June 9, 2007)