Kidnapped victims reunited with families

Two people who were abducted and trafficked over 30 years ago from Mianyang, Sichuan province, recently reunited with their biological parents in their hometown.

Chen Jiurong, 38, reunited with her parents on March 8. She was raised by a foster family with the name Cao Xiaoli in Henan province after she was abducted at age 3.

Her foster grandmother told her that she had been bought from another family. She had always hoped to find her parents, but she didn't have many memories or clues about them.

Her parents are farmers from Beichuan county in Mianyang. They discovered Chen was missing one day in October 1989. The trafficker was arrested three months later but said that Chen had already been sold to a buyer at a train station, and her whereabouts were unknown. The trafficker was later sentenced to 11 years in prison and has since died.

Police in Mianyang collected DNA samples from the couple to be included in a database.

While playing with her son late last year, Chen came across a video about finding missing relatives through DNA matching, which led her to contact the police.

Police told her on Feb 29 that her DNA matched with samples from Chen Jikang, her father, and Wang Qingfen, her mother, in Beichuan county in Mianyang.

In another case, Yu Bo, 36, was reunited with his biological parents on March 8. He was abducted in April 1991 while playing around his home in Mianyang while his mother was cooking.

"There was a lot of traffic where we lived, and when we couldn't find our child, my wife and I started looking immediately, but we couldn't find him. From that day on, I never saw my son again," said his father, Yu Fuqiang.

In 1993, police arrested a trafficker who confessed to having abducted three kids in Mianyang and selling them in Anyang, Henan province, in 1991.

Yu Fuqiang believed that one of the children might be his, so he went to Henan with the Mianyang police to search for and rescue the children. Unfortunately, none of the three rescued children were his.

According to the trafficker, Yu's son was randomly sold to a person at the train station, making the search very difficult. In 1994, three traffickers were sentenced to death for their crimes.

Two years after his son went missing, Yu and his wife had a daughter, but they never gave up looking for their son.

In 2018, Yu was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

"Before the brain tumor surgery, I was worried that I might not survive, and it would be regrettable to never see my son again. But fortunately, the surgery was successful, and I could continue to wait for the day when I would find my son," he said.

In January, police matched the DNA of Yu Fuqiang and his wife, Wu Sirong, with Yu Bo, who lives in Henan province.

Yu, who was raised with the name Wang Haichao, is now a father of two children. He said that he had become aware of his origins in his early teens and had been quietly searching for his biological parents online, but he couldn't find them.

It wasn't until the investigating officers contacted him that he got the information about them.