CHINA: A court in China has upheld the death sentence for child trafficking by a woman who sold more than a dozen children in the 90s, according to a BBC report.
This was the second time that Yu Huaying was sentenced to death after a re-trial was held for her in light of new evidence. The new evidence revealed that she sold 17 children and not 11 as previously alleged.
Her behaviour was discovered in 2022 when a woman Yu had sold for 3,500 yuan (USD$491) in 1995 and reported her capture to police in Guiyang, southwest China.
The victim, Yang Niuhua, was in her early 30s and was looking for her family on social media. She did find her relatives eventually, but her parents had died a few years before that.
Her report led to Yu’s arrest. The court also ordered that all her property be confiscated.
“Yu Huaying’s subjective malice is extremely deep, her criminal behaviour is particularly heinous, and the consequences of her actions are severe, warranting harsh punishment.
Although she confessed, this is insufficient to justify a lighter sentence,” said the court.
According to Chinese media, Yu’s first trafficking victim was her own son, whom she sold for 5,000 yuan. The mother was in her 20s at the time. The child’s father, Gong Xianliang, later became the woman’s child trafficking partner.
Yu Huaying was sentenced to death for child trafficking on Friday at a court in SW China’s Guiyang after a retrial.
During the investigation, Yu abducted and trafficked 17 children from Chongqing and Guizhou to North China’s Hebei Province between 1993 and 1996. pic.twitter.com/7MWUKDHbp8— ShanghaiPanda (@thinking_panda) October 25, 2024
One of the parents of the two children she snatched in 1996 spoke about the ordeal and the hell she went through waiting and hoping for her child to come back.
The mother said she waited at the family’s shoe repair stall, where they were abducted for years. She told reporters last year in a Global Times report:
“The pain the traffickers have caused me is unspeakable, and the break in my family can never be repaired.”
Chinese media also reported that many families whose children Yu had abducted had suffered from depression and been torn apart.
According to the court, Yu had built a complete criminal chain of child trafficking, finding children in the provinces of Guizhou and Yunnan and the municipality of Chongqing in the south and then selling them up north in Hebei through intermediaries.
Yu was previously arrested in 2000 for child abduction but only went to jail for two months. In 2004, she was jailed for eight years for the same reason.