1st Ld-Writethru: China Focus: South China court jails 11 for people trafficking

Nguyen Thi Tuyen and Ban Thi Thuy, who wanted to "dig gold" at China-Vietnam border, never expected the nightmare they would experience.

The two Vietnamese women travelled to a hotel in Dongxing City of south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region to provide sexual services for two Chinese men one night in January 2013.

Just as they arrived, two men dressed as Chinese police officer rushed the scene, handcuffed them, sealed their mouths with tape and bound their feet before carrying the pair in a car to the neighboring Guangdong Province.

In Guangdong, they were sold to a gang that organizes prostitution. Ban was later sold again.

Nguyen and Ban are among the 16 Vietnamese women kidnapped and trafficked by 11 people during the period between November 2012 to March 2013.

On Thursday afternoon, the offenders received their punishments.

The Guangxi Higher People's Court upheld the verdicts of the first trial, sentencing Xie Zongliang to life imprisonment, Deng Liwei to a jail term of 14 years, and nine others to between two and 13 years behind bars. .

The court heard that Xie and Deng took hotel rooms with ID cards that other people lost, entrapping the Vietnamese women by pretending to ask for sexual services. Once the women were in the hotel rooms, other defendants, disguised as police officers, took them by rented cars to Guangdong and sold them.

A profit chain was hence revealed.

Each Vietnamese woman is worth 10,000 yuan (about 1,612 U.S. dollars). "The profit could be as high as 3,000 yuan excluding the cost of fuel when carrying them to other cities," said Xie Naiwen, a gang member.

The verdict of the first trial was delivered on September 24 last year. The defendant claimed they were not aware that "introducing" the women to buyers was illegal. They stood the second trial on January 28 earlier this year.

The Vietnamese women have all been sent back to their country.

China and Vietnam set up an anti-abduction cooperative mechanism in 2001.

In early March, police with Dongxing City of Guangxi asked their Vietnamese counterparts to provide information about a woman named Vu Thi Thuy who was trafficked to north China's Hebei Province for more than two years.

With the help of Chinese police, she was rescued and reunited with her family.

The ordeal of the trafficked Vietnamese women highlights the dire need for harsher laws and more effective anti-trafficking cooperation, in addition to improved border management.

Zhang Shuguo, a lawyer with All China Lawyers Association, told Xinhua that more severe punishments on buyers are necessary. "No demand, no supply," he said. "We should sever the profit chain from the very beginning."

His view was echoed by Zhou Keda, a sociologist with the Guangxi regional academy of social sciences. "The two countries should cooperate in improving legal education among the general public, so as to let them know that buying and selling women and children are serious offences." Endi