This makes nicking Ai Weiwei on tax charges look positively benign:
Yang Libing and Zhou Yinghe, two leading petitioners from a child-trafficking case in Hunan Province, were arrested on June 22 for prostitution, witnesses said.
The two will be under police custody for 15 days as part of the standard penalty for prostitution, according to local authorities.
At the time of their arrest, Yang and Zhou were with a group of parents that were also seeking to petition a child-trafficking case in Shaoyang, Hunan Province.
Yang' younger brother told Caixin that his brother was being framed. "Shaoyang police have not been prosecuting prostitution cases recently. How could my brother be arrested for that reason? Someone wants to restrict his activities," he said.
An investigative report by Caixin in May detailed a child-trafficking system run by local family planning officials. Yang's daughter was abducted by authorities in 2005 after they were unable to pay a 6,000 yuan fine, based on fabricated regulations by local family planning authorities.
We blogged about the story back in May. The children were sold to orphanages and then on to foreign adopters. Read the Caixin investigation here. One way of finding out how many other children adopted from China were kidnapped by local authorities before selling on would be some disclosure from the Western end into where adoption agencies got the children from. It can’t be that much of a secret. I’ve seen TV documentaries about adoption from China.
The dead giveaway that this was a sting is that the "spa" they were taken to was raided by a Shaoyang SWAT team. Usual overkil, there
Posted by: RFH | June 30, 2011 at 09:30 AM