TIANJIN: An official probe has been launched after a disgraced former police chief helped enroll his daughter in college under a stolen identity.

Authorities in the city of Shaoyang, Hunan province, have sent teams to Shaodong county to investigate Wang Zhengrong and have vowed to make their findings public as soon as possible.

Wang headed a township government in the county in 2002 before becoming commissar of the public security bureau of the neighboring Longhui county in 2004.

However, he received a three-year court sentence with a five-year reprieve for bribery in 2007.

Sources said Wang was an influential figure in Shaoyang city, which administers Shaodong and Longhui. He has told police he paid 50,000 yuan ($7,000) to a middleman for the fake ID card. The crook was out of reach, he said, leaving some to question his story.

Wang Jiajun, his daughter, graduated from Guizhou Normal University with a teaching certificate and began working in Guangzhou, last year.

But the qualification will now be cancelled after it has been discovered she had got into the college by using the identity of former classmate Luo Caixia.

Luo, 23, now a student at Tianjin Normal University, noticed something was wrong in March this year when she was stopped from applying for a new bankcard as an account had already been registered with an identical ID card, only with a different photograph.

After looking at photocopies of the card, she recognized the girl in the picture as Wang Jiajun and raised the alarm.

The two girls both took the college entrance exam in 2004.

Luo recorded a decent score of 514, Wang a score of 335, which included a poor 19 points for mathematics.

It is believed Wang Zhengrong or his daughter intercepted her classmate's letter of acceptance from Guizhou, leaving an unwitting Luo to retake the test 12 months later.

"I would feel better if my name was not used by someone other than my classmate. I do not know how to trust people after this," Luo told Xinhua News Agency.

"I have asked myself many times why they chose me? Is it because my parents are farmers and have no connections?"

Xinhua - China Daily

(China Daily 05/11/2009 page2)