A COUPLE in Bao’an District has finally reunited with their missing son who was abducted in a park in 1996 when he was only 2 years old, Southcn.com reported.

    Back on April 1, 1996, the boy’s mother, identified as Liu, reported to Shangchuan Police Station that her son, named Xiaowang, had gone missing at a nearby park.

    Police did not achieve any breakthroughs in the investigation until June 1999 when they managed to identify three suspects related to Xiaowang’s abduction while investigating a robbery case.

    After the suspects were detained, they admitted to abducting the 2-year-old boy in 1996. However, none of them would identify the last person to have trafficked the boy. Police only learned that the person was known as Ma and was the girlfriend of one of the three suspects, surnamed Chen.

    The case had been set aside until 2016 when Bao’an police found that Chen had died from a disease shortly after he was released from jail. The police considered it an opportunity to search for clues from Chen’s relatives.

    An investigation group was sent to Chen’s hometown in Sichuan Province and acquired a photo of Ma.

    After a two-month investigation, police identified a woman, surnamed Zhang, as Ma in the abduction and trafficking case after verifying Zhang’s identity with multiple sources.

    In November, the investigation group captured Zhang in Guangzhou and busted another two suspects in Guangdong Province. The police confirmed that Xiaowang had been sold to a village in Huilai County in Guangdong.

    The couple who bought Xiaowang 20 years ago would not admit that their 22-year-old son, Xie, was actually Xiaowang. A DNA test confirmed that Xie was the boy who was abducted from the Bao’an park 20 years ago.

    Zhang, the other two suspects and the couple who bought the boy, were arrested. (Zhang Qian)