Child trafficking retrial opens in Guiyang

A court in Guiyang, capital of Guizhou province, opened a retrial of a widely followed child abduction and trafficking case on Friday, after some criminal facts were newly discovered.

The case involved Yu Huaying, who had been sentenced to death by the Guiyang Intermediate People's Court last year for abducting and trafficking 11 children in the 1990s for financial gain.

Yu later appealed to a higher court, and the Guizhou High People's Court ordered the intermediate court to rehear the case because it determined that the original ruling omitted some criminal facts.

The omitted facts refer to six other children suspected of being abducted and trafficked by Yu. The intermediate court said on Friday that the total number of victims in Yu's case increased to 17 between 1993 and 2003.

China Central Television said that Yu met a man, Gong Xianliang, while she was in her 20s and working away from home. She later gave birth to a boy while living with Gong, and, due to a lack of financial resources, the two sent their son to Hebei through a middleman and sold him for 5,000 yuan ($707), starting Yu's illegal journey of abducting children to collect money.

The 17 victims came from 12 families, including five where Yu had abducted two children at a time, and some children were abandoned by her, Xinhua News Agency said, adding that the victims and their families requested the court to severely punish the woman.

The intermediate court said it will announce the verdict of the retrial at a later date. In September 2023, Yu, 60, a native of Yunnan province, stood at trial at the intermediate court for the first time. She was identified as benefiting from abducting and trafficking children from Chongqing and Guizhou to Hebei province between 1993 and 1996.

At the time, the court said that Yu carried out the abductions with Gong, who died during the course of the case, adding that two other people who participated in the abductions had also been dealt with in separate cases.

Considering the large number of children Yu abducted and the fact that her offenses were extremely severe and had a negative effect on society, the court imposed the death penalty on her, and also stripped Yu of her political rights for life and confiscated all of her personal assets.

Yu pleaded guilty during the trial, but she soon appealed for leniency in sentencing for the offenses to the high court.

At the beginning of this year, the high court sent Yu's case back to the intermediate court because some criminal facts were incomplete, stressing "in order to thoroughly investigate all the criminal facts, a retrial is necessary."

Yu's case aroused the public's widespread attention in 2022 when police in Guiyang received a report from Yang Niuhua, who was snatched by Yu in Guizhou and taken to Hebei in 1995.

Over the years, Yang, a native of Guiyang, never stopped searching for her family. In April 2021, thanks to a video she posted on the video-sharing platform Douyin, she was reunited with her family a month later after receiving a successful DNA match from relevant tests.

In June 2022, after Yang returned to her hometown, she went to Guiyang police to provide clues about her abduction. Yu was soon captured in Chongqing.

About a month before Yu's retrial, her husband, Wang Jiawen, also pleaded guilty to child trafficking, with a Yunnan court expected to announce the verdict at a later date.