Chinese police find 29 children among 217 more "slave" labourers

Jun 14, 2007, 10:59 GMT

Beijing - Police in central China's Henan province have rescued another 217 labourers, including 29 children, who were held in conditions of virtual slavery at brickworks, state media said Thursday.

The police detained 120 people accused of trafficking the labourers to the brickworks, where they were beaten, starved and forced to work long hours without payment, the official Xinhua news agency quoted provincial officials as saying.

The province sent out 35,000 police to check 7,500 brickworks in Henan from June 9 to 12 and set up a special task force to crack down on the illegal labour practices, the agency said.

'We must do everything we can to fight human trafficking and help those held captive,' Qin Yuhai, the Henan police chief and provincial vice governor, was quoted as saying.

The raids followed reports earlier in June that police in the neighbouring province of Shanxi had rescued 31 Henan labourers, including one who was 14 years old.

The workers said they were forced by owners of a brickworks to work 20 hours a day and live on bread and water.

A group of 11 hired thugs ensured that the labourers kept working and did not leave the compound housing the brickworks, which was owned by the son of a village secretary of China's ruling Communist Party, the Beijing News and other media reported.

Another worker was allegedly beaten to death with a hammer for working too slowly, the reports said.

Also on Thursday, state media said at least 1,000 children were working at brickworks in conditions of near slavery in Shanxi.

Many of the children were tricked or abducted from Henan and sold as labourers in several areas of southern Shanxi, the Shanghai Morning Post (Xinwen Chen Bao) and other media reported.

The plight of the child labourers was highlighted by a group of 400 parents from Henan who travelled to Shanxi to search for their missing children, the reports said.

The local Shanxi Evening News had already highlighted the problem of child labour in local brickworks in 2004, according to a report seen on the newspaper's website Thursday.