A woman who kidnapped and sold 11 children in China between 1993 and 1996 was sentenced to death on Tuesday, according to the verdict published by the Intermediate Court in the city of Guiyang, in the center of the country.
The woman, Yu Huaying, who plans to appeal the decision, was sentenced to death after the court found that her crime had caused “extremely significant” social harm and that the circumstances in which she committed it were “particularly serious” goods.
According to the verdict, Yu kidnapped minors in southwestern China and sold them in Handan city, northern China’s Hebei province.
The crimes were committed with an accomplice named Gong, who has since died, while two other people who acted as middlemen in the sale of the children will be tried separately.
According to the Beijing News newspaper, in 1992 Yu, now 60 years old, sold a son born from an extramarital relationship with Gong, with whom he later devoted himself to kidnapping and selling minors, mainly from poor families.
The woman’s arrest took place after one of her victims managed to locate her biological sister and provide police with information about the kidnapper.
Human trafficking is a persistent problem in China, exacerbated by the former one-child policy and the demographic gender imbalance that saw 42 million more men than women in 2017, according to the World Bank.
In recent years, technologies such as DNA analysis and facial recognition have helped solve cases that had been stuck for decades.
Between 2010 and 2019, the number of cases of trafficking in women and minors reached 112,703, according to data from the Asian country’s National Statistics Office.
Chinese authorities do not provide official data on the number of death row inmates, but in its 2022 annual report, human rights group Amnesty International noted that “thousands of executions are carried out” in the country every year.
Source: DN
