‘Fox Hunt’ nets 22 fugitives in just 4 months
Print Edition
SHANGHAI police said yesterday that they have hunted down and repatriated 22 fugitives from 14 countries and regions as part of a national campaign to find people who had fled overseas with illicit assets.
“Fox Hunt 2014,” launched in July by the Ministry of Public Security, aims to capture corrupt officials and suspects in economic crimes who have escaped abroad. By the end of October it had netted 180 suspects.
Police in Shanghai said 11 of the fugitives had been living overseas for more than five years. Ten had been persuaded to return, often by calling them directly or contacting their families. The other 12, who refused to return, were arrested with the help of police abroad.
One of the 22 was a 47-year-old man surnamed Zhang. The suspect in a 1997 fraud case had lived in Indonesia for 17 years after fleeing China.
Interviewed by Shanghai Daily, he said it wasn’t a bad thing to be going home as he had wanted to return years ago but had lacked the courage to surrender.
“There is an Indonesian saying, the money you get from evil will be all taken by evil,” Zhang said.
“I spent all the money I took, and couldn’t afford even a ticket for a ship.”
Zhang is said to have posed as a bank manager to help accomplices swindle a local firm out of 10 million yuan (US$1.6 million) with a forged document.
After being named by police, he took a flight to Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, on October 4, 1997. It was a time of great upheaval in the country and police lost track of him.
But in 2011, police heard that Zhang had been working as a tourist guide in Bali and the case was reopened.
Last year, after being told that Indonesian police were investigating a man with a similar description to Zhang, Shanghai officers went to Indonesia only to find he had fled again.
Language barriers
However, in August this year, a team of four officers went to Indonesia again and managed to catch up with him, after some difficulties with the language.
“Indonesians are generally not good at English,” one of the officers said.
To help the investigation, a university professor was found who acted as a go-between for Shanghai with Indonesian police and other officials.
Zhang was arrested on September 1 at the travel agency he was working for and repatriated 17 days later.
In the early days of his flight from China’s mainland, Zhang changed his identity seven times, mostly by buying forged identity documents on the black market.
“I have been to most areas of Indonesia during the past 17 years. I’ve worked as a prospector, a palm seed picker and a breeder of shrimp and grouper. I married an Indonesian woman and have two adopted daughters,” Zhang said.
“I thought police wouldn’t find me because I have a new identity and a new life,” he said.
Another repatriated fugitive, a 44-year-old man surnamed Jin, was captured on his birthday this year after he returned from Canada with his wife and children for a party.
In 1996, Jin, who was responsible for a local elevator company’s sales, confessed to police that he had taken a US$20,000 bribe from a client. He returned the money but fled to the United States before his arrest had been approved.
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