Chinese border police have seized three human traffickers who tried to smuggle 12 teenagers to Canada by disguising them as kungfu masters from the Shaolin Temple.

The three traffickers, including two coaches from a martial arts school in Songshan of the central Henan Province, home to the 1,500-year-old temple, charged each teenager US$70,000 to 90,000 to smuggle them out of the country.

The two coaches, who often accompany students to performing tours abroad, reached a tacit agreement with a notorious "snakehead" in Changle, a city in the eastern Fujian Province, to recruit the teenagers as "martial arts performers from Henan" in May.

The teenagers, aged 17 to 19, were in fact natives of Changle and knew nothing about martial arts. They received brief training at a hotel in Henan's provincial capital, Zhengzhou, on June 24 to learn the basics of lion dancing and to get used to their false identities.

On June 29, they flew to Shenzhen, a port city in the southern Guangdong Province, to join a delegation of 16 genuine kungfu performers from the martial arts school who were scheduled to leave for Canada via Hong Kong the next day.

But the group aroused suspicion and was stopped at the Huanggang checkpoint, a major entry point into Hong Kong. The 12 bogus performers and the two alleged coaches, surnamed Feng and Chen, were detained by Shenzhen border police and returned to Fujian for interrogation.

The alleged snakehead from Changle, an unemployed man in his 30s surnamed Huang, was arrested on Monday after six weeks on the run.

A spokesman with the border police in Changle said the case had been a deal between the two coaches and Huang. "The Shaolin Temple had nothing to do with it," an officer surnamed Wang told Xinhua in a telephone interview.

Wang said the three traffickers had smuggled 14 people out of China last year, by passing them off as kungfu performers alongside real masters from their martial arts school, which had become famous internationally for teaching Shaolin Kungfu.

Many amateur kungfu practitioners in Henan claim they are Shaolin masters in order to recruit students from other parts of the country.

The Shaolin Temple at Songshan Mountain has drawn foreign dignitaries, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge.

(Xinhua News Agency August 10, 2007)