Suspected murderers of two children arrested in SW China

Two men suspected of murdering two children in a village in southwest China's Guizhou Province were captured on Thursday, local police said Friday.

The two have confessed to killing a 15-year-old girl and her 12-year-old brother at their home in Zhongxin village in Nayong county of Bijie city on Tuesday morning while their father and elder sister were not at home.

The Nayong police authorities gave no further details on the suspects' identities and motives.

The dead girl was a drop-out who had suffered from the sequela of encephalitis B and her brother was a primary school student. Their mother had died and the migrant worker father occasionally went to the provincial capital of Guiyang, leaving the kids at the care of their uncle.

Earlier police investigation found that the father left home on Sunday and his elder daughter, 17, went to see a relative on Monday night and did not return home.h The latest case adds another tragedy to the poor mountainous region where four "left-behind" children of one family, aged 5 to 13, died after drinking pesticide at home in a village also in the city of Bijie on June 9.

The tragic deaths exposed the plight of a vast number of poor children without parental care in China.

China has more than 60 million children in rural areas who are left with relatives, usually grandparents. According to a 2013 report released by the All-China Women's Federation, nearly 3.4 percent of these children live alone.

The "left-behind" children fall easy victims to such tragedies as killing, trafficking and suicide.

In 2012, five street children also in Bijie died from carbon monoxide poisoning when burning charcoal for warmth in a roadside dumpster.

China's one-child policy allows rural families and ethnic minorities to have more children than the urban norm. Also some pay fines for more children than policy allows. Endi