China executes two for trafficking children

Beijing - China has executed two men convicted of abducting and trafficking at least 15 children, state media said on Friday. The men were executed on Thursday after they were convicted in cases in the south-western province of Yunnan and the central province of Henan, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Hu Minghua, 55, was convicted of abducting and selling nine boys from April 1999 to October 2005, after he was arrested for heroin trafficking in January 2006 in Kunming, the Yunnan provincial capital, the agency said.

Police returned five of the boys, who were between three and six years old, to their parents but they were unable to trace the families of the other four.

In Henan, Su Binde, 27, was executed after he was convicted of abducting six children in 2005 and 2006.

A court also convicted Su of staging six robberies and kidnapping a taxi driver who later died of organ failure, the agency said.

The government apparently publicized the two cases as a part of its campaign against child trafficking.

Wang Shaonan, a spokesman for the Supreme People's Court, which approved the executions, was quoted as saying that courts nationwide punished 1,714 people for abducting and trafficking children in the first 10 months of this year.

Wang said child trafficking was still rising in China.

Police rescued more than 2,000 children from child-trafficking gangs in a six-month campaign this year, he said.

China keeps the number of executions a state secret, but the US-based Dui Hua Foundation has estimated that at least 5,000 people have been executed annually in recent years, more than in the rest of the world combined.

It claims to have limited the use of the death penalty in recent years but retains it for 68 offenses, including drug trafficking, serious corruption and other non-violent crimes.

On Tuesday, two people were executed in the northern city of Shijiazhuang for producing and selling tainted milk powder that made tens of thousands of infants ill nationwide.