Zhang Qian

    zhqcindy@163.com

    A SHENZHEN girl was found by police in Dongguan, a city neighboring Shenzhen, yesterday morning, two days after being abducted by a suspected human trafficker Saturday, according to Guangming police’s official microblog account.

    Li Yujia, 6, was reported missing at around 10 a.m. Saturday, the last day of the three-day Mid-Autumn Festival holiday, from Changzhen Village in Guangming New Area. It was the day after Li’s sixth birthday.

    Li’s mother, Wang Shan, called her daughter’s smart watch from work at 10 a.m. on the day of the incident, but Li did not pick up the call. “She might be just playing around,” Wang thought to herself when no one answered the call.

    Wang checked the location of her daughter through her smart watch location finder on her phone and found that her daughter was still in the village, so she did not worry about the unanswered call. However, when Wang called again in the afternoon, a man picked up the phone.

    “I knew something must have happened to my daughter,” said Wang when she heard a man’s voice from the other side of the phone.

    Together with the police, Li’s parents looked up the footage caught by the surveillance cameras in Changzhen Village, but did not find any trace of their daughter. The family and the police posted missing flyers around the village the next day.

    It was not until Sunday morning when the police looked at the footage again that Li was spotted in an alley near a kindergarten inside the village. Footage showed that the girl was talking to a man around 8 a.m. Sunday and the man suddenly lifted her up and ran away.

    Police found Li and the suspect inside of a hotel in Shipai Village in Dongguan at about 9 a.m. yesterday.

    The girl was in good physical and mental condition when she was found. The suspect, surnamed Luo, 27, was detained by the police for allegedly abducting a child.

    Child trafficking has been a recurring problem in China. More than 10,000 children are abducted each year, according to a report by Chinanews.com last year.

    According to Caixin.com, an analysis conducted last year on the basis of 133 child trafficking cases across the nation showed that children under 6 are most vulnerable to becoming targets of human traffickers for the purpose of adoption. More than half of the cases were committed by the children’s parents or relatives.

    To combat child trafficking, the Ministry of Public Security has set up a DNA database to link all the country’s 236 DNA laboratories so that they can share information about missing children.