Vietnamese police arrest Chinese child traffickers

Feb 25, 2010, 11:04 GMT

Hanoi - Vietnamese police at the Chinese border arrested two Chinese men on suspicion of human trafficking and freed a woman and four small children, a police official said Thursday.

Border police in the province of Ha Giang arrested the men, Tho Mi, 42, and Tho Mi Tua, 39, on Wednesday.

They were reportedly transporting four Vietnamese children, aged one to five, and a 24-year-old Vietnamese woman to be sold in China.

All of the trafficking victims came from Ha Giang's mountainous Meo Vac district, which is heavily populated by members of the Hmong and other ethnic minorities.

'They kidnapped the children to sell them in China,' said Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Chau of the Ha Giang border police. 'Each child can be sold for 5,000 to 30,000 yuan (730 to 4,400 dollars).'

Chau said the Chinese traffickers were the latest of several the Ha Giang border police had arrested in recent months.

The police newspaper Cong An Nhan Dan reported Thursday that border police had arrested two other Chinese men in Ha Giang in October as they were overpowering a woman they planned to traffic to China.

Chau said other cases involved traffickers kidnapping children walking alone, or fraudulently convincing parents to leave children in their care temporarily.

Ha Giang border police statistics showed at least 40 women and children have been kidnapped and trafficked abroad in the past three years.