A city in South China's Guangdong Province cracked down on a criminal group practising in child abduction and trafficking and saved seven children earlier this month, the Guangzhou Daily reported on Thursday.

Nine people were seized by local police, and all the children were sent back to their parents on Monday, an official of the Jiangmen public security bureau told China Daily yesterday.

From July last year to January this year, seven boys aged 2-5 vanished in different parts of Kaiping city, a county-level city of Jiangmen, arousing great concern from the public and media.

The boys' parents are migrant workers from other provinces. All the cases occurred either from 10:00 AM to noon or from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM. Therefore, the public security bureaus of Jiangmen and Kaiping believe the children were taken by the same group of criminals, the Jiangmen security official said.

The bureaus' investigation alleges that a woman named Xue Hui in her 30s is a key member of the group.

On January 25, the public security bureau of Enping city, a city close to Kaiping, saved a little boy surnamed Wu in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.

The details of that case were very similar to the previous seven cases.

Acting on information from Enping, Kaiping's police detected that the abductor involved in Wu's case was Xue Hui, originally from Guangxi but currently residing in Taishan. Taishan, Enping and Kaiping are all county-level cities belonging to Jiangmen in Guangdong Province.

On February 11, police from the Jiangmen and Kaiping public security bureaus seized Xue in Taishan.

She is alleged to have confessed that the criminal group abducted the boys from July 24 last year to January 10 this year, and sold them in Enping, the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Fujian Province at 20,000 yuan (US$2,941) to 40,000 yuan for each child.

Armed with this information from Hui, police seized another three alleged kidnappers the same day. Then, from February 13-15, police captured another five in other parts of Jiangmen.

A couple days later, police found all of the missing children in Enping, Guangxi and Fujian.

(China Daily February 27, 2009)