Chinese police rescue 33 Vietnamese women from traffickers
NAN-F-31
Trafficking
Kunming, Jan. 25, 2018 (Xinhua/NAN) Railway police in southwest China have rescued 33 women trafficked from Vietnam and busted several cross-border human trafficking rings, local authorities said on Thursday.
The police said the Yunnan province officers had already caught 78 suspects involved in international women trafficking from October 2016 till date.
The police said they started launching an investigation into the matter after they found several women held fake ID cards and were unable to speak Chinese at Kunming railway station in 2016.
Preliminary investigation showed that gang members had colluded with suspects in Vietnam, conning Vietnamese women into China by pretending that they were offering recruitment, travel and matchmaking services.
The trafficked Vietnamese women have been transferred to Vietnamese police.
The Chinese police had on Feb. 9, 2016 said that they rescued 32 Vietnamese women who were sold as brides to farmers in an operation aimed at curbing the practice in the impoverished countryside.
Yunnan Public Security Department had said that authorities arrested 75 suspects in that same period for allegedly being part of a ring that lured women to southwest China’s Yunnan province with promises of tourism and work.
The victims were kept in large numbers in “captive families” in Yunnan, close to the Vietnamese border, in remote, mountainous areas before being sold to people in six provinces in central and east China.
One of the victims recounted, “when I tried to escape, two men caught me and beat me with a steel pipe. They threatened me when I refused to be their bride.”
Bride trafficking is a serious problem in China, where women are sold to men mostly in rural areas, who cannot find wives at home because of the country’s huge gender imbalance.
The problem is particularly serious in impoverished areas, where farmers see “buying” a bride from abroad as cheaper than paying a dowry for a Chinese bride.
The police said they had begun investigating into the case since September 2015.
“This happened after discovering a woman, who did not speak Chinese, was sold as a bride from Vietnam for 80,000 yuan (11,600 dollars).”
However, the Chinese police said they had “rescued and repatriated” a total of 1,281 abducted foreign women since 2012 who are mostly from the Southeast Asia.
Human traffickers could face death penalty in China. (dpa/NAN)
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Edited by Celine-Damilola Oyewole/Ejike Obeta