75 held in crackdown on illegal gender tests
Print Edition
SEVENTY-FIVE suspects have been detained for sending blood samples from pregnant women from the Chinese mainland to Hong Kong for tests to ascertain the sex of their babies, according to a report in yesterday’s Wenzhou City News.
The alleged ringleader, a 59-year-old Hong Kong man surnamed Lin, is still being hunted together with more than 40 other suspects in the largest case of its kind in China, the newspaper said.
Police in Wenzhou’s Yongjia
County in east China’s Zhejiang Province said the number of suspects could exceed 300 and the money involved is estimated at more than 200 million yuan (US$30 million).
Some women in Yongjia who paid for the service were from rural districts and mostly pregnant with a second child. They hoped to find out if they were expecting a boy, police said.
At least four women of 10 known to police aborted their babies because they were found to be girls.
Police believe that by the end of last year, about 50,000 women had paid for the illegal service since 2013 when Lin is alleged to have started the business in Shenzhen in south China’s Guangdong Province.
Police told the newspaper that during a March crackdown on illegal gender tests and abortions they found a suspect surnamed Li, a former hospital worker, pitching the service to pregnant women in Zhejiang’s Leqing City and Yongjia.
Another suspect, a man surnamed Zhou, who worked in a private hospital in Leqing, also emerged around that time. He is alleged to have taken blood samples from women at his office and a rented apartment.
Both were suspected of moonlighting as agents for a Shenzhen-based company called Kanghai, which turned out to be a part of the network allegedly led by Lin.
Shenzhen, which neighbors Hong Kong, is a popular transfer point for blood samples in the illegal trade as DNA gender tests for babies are not considered against the law in Hong Kong, police told the newspaper.
The blood samples were said to have been mailed to Shenzhen as cosmetics, picked up by local agents and then taken to Hong Kong.
In December last year police rounded up 11 suspects in Shenzhen, which led to more arrests later.
Lin and his colleagues are alleged to have owned over 30 companies which employed 120 people and around 200 agents.
Police said the employees, most of them women in their 20s and 30s, were paid up to 200,000 yuan a month.
The cost of a gender test under the illegal scheme was 6,000 yuan in most cases, police told the newspaper.
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