CHINA: Police have arrested 10 suspects in an apparent scheme to smuggle and sell 28 baby girls who were found in nylon bags on a bus in southern China.
A photograph in yesterday's Beijing Morning News showed some of the bags - about the size of gym bags - spread out on the ground in front of the bus in the town of Binyang in Guangxi, one of the nation's poorest areas.
Authorities were trying to find the infants' parents, said a government official in the region.
"Some of the babies were abandoned, while others were abducted," he said. The suspects were arrested after police, acting on a tip-off, discovered the babies while searching the bus.
Local media reported that the babies were all under three months old and that one died after being found.
The Beijing Morning News said the smugglers might have drugged the infants to keep them from crying.
The babies were apparently being smuggled for sale, though police did not know where they had come from or where they were being taken, the newspaper reported. The paper has said the bus departed from Yulin, a rural district of Guangxi, for the eastern province of Anhui.
Chinese officials say an unknown number of children are abducted every year for sale to childless families.
Older girls are sometimes sold as brides in rural areas with fewer women.
In rural China, families traditionally value boys over girls because they are seen as carrying on the family name, working fields and caring for parents. - (AP)