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CHINA - POLICE SAVE HUNDREDS OF
BABIES FROM ONLINE BABY TRADING & TRAFFICKING RING
Chinese police have rescued 382 babies in a sting operation on a baby-trafficking ring that has led to the arrest of more than 1,000 individuals. Photo via UN News
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By
Sophie Brown and CY Xu, CNN - March 1, 2014
Beijing (CNN) -- China has smashed
four child-trafficking rings and arrested more than a thousand people for using
websites and instant messaging groups to trade babies, Chinese authorities said
Friday.
On February 19, police from 27 provinces across China
rescued 382 babies and arrested 1,094 people suspected of buying and selling
infants online, China's Ministry of Public Security said in a statement on its website.
The sting was part of a six-month operation launched
after police in Beijing and Jiangsu in eastern China received reports of a
website promoting private adoptions.
Potential buyers
Further investigations uncovered a virtual
black market -- involving four websites, online forums and some 30 groups on a
popular Chinese messaging platform -- that connected traffickers with potential
buyers.
The ministry said some of the people arrested confessed
to using the sites.
According to local media reports, 27 suspects were
arrested in the country's southern Sichuan province, where 13 babies were also
rescued. Another 43 suspects were arrested and 11 babies rescued in Anhui
province, in eastern China.
A woman arrested by police in Leshan, Sichuan admitted to
buying two baby girls from Wuhan and Chengdu, in August 2013 and January 2014,
respectively, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported.
Another couple in their 30s told CCTV they used a Chinese
website to buy a baby from an expectant teenage couple in Chengdu. They paid
20,000 yuan (US$3,250) for the child.
It is not known where the other arrests took place.
Major concern
Child
trafficking has become a major concern in China, as traffickers seek to
profit off a growing
demand for healthy babies from potential adoptive parents both in China and
beyond.
Last month, a Chinese doctor received a suspended death
sentence for selling
babies to a trafficking ring. The woman, an obstetrician at a hospital in
Shaanxi province in central China, sold seven babies in six separate cases
after persuading her patients that their newborns were sick and should be given
up, according to statements posted on the local court's official microblog
account.
The ministry said its investigation into the online
baby-trading networks is still ongoing. It did not say whether charges have
been brought against any of the suspects, or if the trafficking extended beyond
China.
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