Latest arrests made in Shenzhen amid national drive to fight crime
Police have arrested 17 suspects in Shenzhen as part of a major dragnet aimed at child kidnapping, amid a nationwide crackdown on the crime.
The latest arrests involved 51 cases that targeted parents of students in the city in Guangdong province with kidnapping scams, local police said yesterday.
The police launched their sweep between Jan 11 and 26 following mounting worries about kidnappings, Deng Guangsheng, deputy director of the local police's criminal investigation department, said in a press briefing.
Many parents in the city grew increasingly worried after rumors spread over dozens of student kidnappings that occurred since last October.
In their scams, suspects tried fooling their victims into paying ransoms for children whom they did not actually kidnap.
But local police confirmed there were three kidnapping cases in a month starting from October, when two children were killed and six suspects arrested.
The arrests also marked a major step in national efforts to clamp down on kidnapping cases, after central authorities announced a crackdown on the crimes targeting children and their parents.
Police in Guangdong, Henan, Hubei, Qinghai and Shaanxi provinces have also outlined major plans to prevent child kidnappings.
Similarly, more severe penalties for the crime are being meted out.
On Thursday, two courts in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong, sentenced 25 people to death in separate trials in nine kidnapping cases, according to Xinhua News Agency.
In one case handed down by the Municipal Intermediate People's Court of Guangzhou, one of three defendants was given the death penalty, while jail terms of 10 and 12 years were given to the other two.
The family of the case's victim, who died at the hands of the defendants, will receive compensation of more than 150,000 yuan ($22,000).
In another case, two kidnappers held an 11-year-old child for three days for ransom. One of the kidnappers was subsequently jailed 11 years, while the other one was jailed eight years.
The Guangzhou's Municipal Intermediate People's Court and the People's Court of Zengcheng, a suburb of Guangzhou, also handed out jail terms of up to 20 years for 26 other people in similar cases.
In one of the latest kidnapping scams in Shenzhen, a man surnamed Gu reportedly received a call from a strange number on Jan 6 and heard a boy crying. Kidnappers told him his child was being held and demanded a ransom of 120,000 yuan.
Gu immediately transferred 50,000 yuan to a bank account designated by the callers. But he realized he was cheated when he found his son safe in school after the money transfer.
After intensive investigations, Shenzhen police identified four suspects and arrested them in Fujian province one week later. The group was allegedly cheating parents of students in more than 20 similar cases in Shenzhen and Shanghai.
In other cases, suspects also told parents to remit money for the sake of their children. The threats were made through cell phone text messages, but no kidnappings were actually carried out in all of the 51 cases in Shenzhen, Deng Guangsheng said.
"The suspects acquired some information on the family members and threatened parents that they would hurt their children. But they did not hurt any children in the cases," Deng said.
"We are not rich but I will urge my daughter to come back home as soon as possible after school," full-time housewife Li Yachun said of her 9-year-old daughter.
Zhang Zhiwei, a lawyer and volunteer with nongovernmental organization Baby Come Home, said the government should do more to protect children.
"The number of child trafficking cases is also increasing, but only a few of them have been found and saved by police," he said.
Many parents looking for missing children go to groups such as Baby Come Home because of limited government resources, Zhang said.
"That might be a reason why some parents will still pay the so-called kidnappers, even if the danger comes from just one text message."
(China Daily 02/09/2010 page1)