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A doctor confessed to stealing seven newborns and selling them for cash, exposing an underground human trafficking ring in China.
According to the official Xinhua News Agency, 55-year-old Zhang Shuxia stood in front of a court in central China on Monday and pleaded guilty to selling seven babies to traffickers between November 2011 and July 2013.
While working as an obstetrician at the Fuping County Maternal and Child Hospital in central Shaanxi province, Ms. Zhang persuaded couples to give up their newborns by telling them they had complex health problems, Xinhua said. Six of the seven children Ms. Zhang abducted have been returned to their parents, Xinhua said, while one child who was sold for 1,000 yuan, or roughly $165, died.
Attempts to reach Ms. Zhang were unsuccessful. The Fuping County Maternal and Child Hospital declined to comment.
Ms. Zhang’s case exposed her as the anchor of an infant trafficking ring that operated across at least four provinces, according to a report from the state-run People’s Daily.
Child trafficking, while problematic globally, has taken hold in China, where there is an underground market for forced labor and prostitution. Police last year police uncovered 1,868 child trafficking cases and 4,760 cases of trafficking of women, according to China Daily.
Child trafficking has become so common that it has given rise to Internet services like Baobei Huijia, or Baby Come Home, that reunite abducted and lost children with their families.
Ms. Zhang was reported to local authorities in July, after telling two parents their newborn son had contracted syphilis and hepatitis B from the mother and would not survive, China Daily said. Ms. Zhang refused to return the baby to the couple, who went to another county hospital, where test results showed that the mother had neither syphilis nor hepatitis B, the report said.
Police used surveillance video to determine that Ms. Zhang took the baby from the hospital, China Daily said. She had sold the couple’s baby for 21,600 yuan, or roughly $3,600, to a trafficker in a nearby province, and he resold the child for 59,800 yuan, Xinhua said, adding that suspects in the case have been detained in at least four other provinces.
The hospital’s president, two other senior hospital managers and three county officials also were dismissed over the matter, according to Xinhua.
The Weinan Intermediate People’s Court, where Ms. Zhang was tried, has not yet issued a final verdict according to its microblog. Local media reports say Ms. Zhang could face the death penalty.
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