Nanjing Police have brought an end to a 31-year-old people trafficking case in which women and children were abducted and sold. The fugitive, a 53 year-old woman, was arrested yesterday, 9 April, after revealing that she too had been trafficked.
Back in 1989, Ms. Huang was just 22 years old. A local of Jinhua City, Pujiang County, Zhejiang Province, she and a Mr. Wu abducted five young women and trafficked them to Anhui Province.
Zhejiang police launched a successful rescue operation for all five and captured Wu, but his female partner in crime had disappeared. Huang evaded capture until yesterday.
In the course of their work, the Nanjing Public Security Bureau, Jiangning Branch, found there was a woman within their juristriction bearing a resemblance to Huang, who was active in a local farming and food distribution market.
- Fugitives On-the-Run Nabbed Due to Heightened Police Checks
- DNA Helps Police Snatch Murderer on Eve of Release for Theft
- Nanjing Police Post-New Year Drug Struggles Just the Start
Their investigations took them initially to Zhejiang, where police gleamed little to help. Huang had had a complicated family relationship. Three sisters had married far away and no longer lived in the area. The family home was in a dilapidated state. Older villagers had ambiguous memories and never saw Huang return to the village or have any kind of contact in the 30-plus years. Huang’s parents had also passed away and police were unable to confirm any identities, reports the Yangtze Evening News.
The ad-hoc investigation team immediately adjusted its thinking, and returned focus to the distribution centre back in Nanjing. Subsequent investigations revealed that the woman was a out-of-towner from a village in Xuzhou City in northern Jiangsu Province.
There, it was found that the woman went by the surname of Wang, that her husband was a native of Xuzhou with two sons who were both grown-up and married, and no conflict with villagers. The family operated a vegetable wholesale business and managed a self-sufficient life. Nothing at first appeared out of place.
Then police noticed that Wang was said to be born in Yiwu, a county-level city also under the jurisdiction of Jinhua in Zhejiang, only a 20-minute drive from Huang’s village. However, local public security organs were unable to find any household registration records for her supposedly surnamed Wang.
Back in Xuzhou, neither was any record found for Wang there. But police did find registered nearby someone by the name of Zhang who came and went a lot. Their suspicions aroused, police accidentally discovered that Zhang was a fugitive from the same village as Huang.
- Arrest of Suspect in 28-Year-Old Nanjing Murder Case
- Nanjing Police Seize Thousands of Fake Train Tickets
- Pukou SWAT Police Strangle Wild Boar in Hospital
Convinced they now had their people trafficker, after her two changes of identity, police captured Huang at a roadside trading post near to the farming and food distribution market in Nanjing.
Initially denying any connection with Zhejiang, police then showed Huang photos of her old house, informing her that her parents had passed away more than 10 years prior. They had always regretted not seeing their daughter. In the end, Huang confessed to using the alternate identities and to the 1989 selling of five young women in Pujiang County.
The bitter twist in this sordid people trafficking case came as Huang revealed the reason she had not been originally captured together with Wu. For she herself was also sold by Wu and taken to the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. After Wu’s arrest, Huang searched for an opportunity to escape from the trafficked family, but dared not surrender to police or return to her hometown.
Instead, she settled in Xuzhou, got married and with her husband often delivered and sold their agricultural products at the market in Nanjing, where she remained anonymous for 31 years.
