Mother reunited with baby after program sparks probe
Print Edition
A MOTHER who had come up against a brick wall in her efforts to find the baby taken from her at birth was reunited with her son yesterday after authorities launched an investigation.
A nurse, Liang Xiaohua, suspected of baby trafficking is in custody, officials in Chifeng City in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region said last night.
On Monday, China Central Television reported that both police and the hospital had refused to investigate claims that a nurse had sold the boy after telling the 18-year-old single mother, surnamed Zhang, that the baby had been still-born.
After the program aired, Chifeng’s Party committee and the local government set up a task force to look into the case and the baby was traced to a family in Ar Khorchin Banner.
Chifeng authorities said officials would be punished for any dereliction of duty.
A statement on Chifeng’s official website also said measures were in place to prevent such cases happening in the future.
Previously, the police in Chifeng had said there were no “criminal facts” in the case and thus declined to carry out an investigation, while the city’s health bureau said it was a police matter. Police where the boy was found had also rejected a request for an investigation, CCTV said.
The boy’s mother and her family couldn’t understand why the authorities were shirking their responsibilities, CCTV reported.
“I just want to know where my son is. And how he is,” Zhang said before yesterday’s good news.
Zhang said she got pregnant in April last year and gave birth at Chifeng Reproductive Health Hospital on November 5.
“They neither showed me the baby nor told me whether it was alive or not,” Zhang said. She became convinced she had delivered a dead infant because she was charged 20 yuan as a fee to deal with the body.
But three days later, police in Ar Khorchin Banner, 300 kilometers from Chifeng, told her the baby had been sold to a local villager for 40,000 yuan (US$6,600).
They told the family the baby had been sold directly from the hospital, CCTV reported.
Zheng Tiansheng, the hospital director, is said to have told the family that a nurse was afraid the baby wouldn’t survive so asked her cousin to raise him.
Meanwhile, a police officer directly involved in the case began avoiding Zhang’s family, saying he was too busy to see them.
But the family discovered that a man called Wen Guoqiang was raising the boy and decided to retrieve the baby themselves, CCTV reported.
But when they arrived at Wen’s home, he and the baby had left. Wen’s mother said a relative, Liang, had given the baby to her son.
Liang was a nurse at the hospital, CCTV said.
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