Children are being sent to the US via Europe and an international paedophile racket, believed to be one of the largest in Europe, has been uncovered in Italy, according to a BBC report.
The criminal ring was smashed when a Japanese man and a Chinese woman were arrested at Milan airport while accompanying a 12-year-old Chinese girl. The pair will be charged with kidnapping, extortion and associating with the Mafia. Since the arrest, the girl has told police how the paedophile ring operates. She was sold into prostitution by her parents in China, then worked in a brothel in Thailand before being sent to Miami via Europe.
Mafia gangs buy boys and girls from poor families or parents, who are banned under Chinese law from having a second child. Italy is believed to be a major staging post for the transit of child prostitutes from Asia to Europe and the US. In one month the gangs smuggled 15 children to the US through European airports, including Milan.
After the arrest of the couple in April three more people were seized in Japan, while three are still being sought in Italy. Italian police believe the discovery marks only the tip of the iceberg of paedophile crime run by Chinese triads, or Mafia gangs, and Japanese gangsters. Investigations are continuing with the help of Interpol. Reuters reports from Beijing:
The international paedophile ring was a new twist to a problem of gang-controlled smuggling of people out of China, experts in Beijing said yesterday.
Chinese security officials said they had no information on reports from Italy that a paedophile syndicate selling Chinese children into prostitution in the US had been exposed.
Western diplomats and aid workers expressed some surprise, saying it was the first time they had heard of a flesh trade to the West in Chinese children.
"It is well known that Chinese gangs smuggle illegal immigrants to the US, but this is the first time that I have heard about the smuggling of children for sex," said a Beijing-based US crime expert.
The sophistication of such a scheme goes beyond the welldocumented traffic in Chinese girls - mostly from ethnic minority groups - across China's border into south-east Asian brothels.
An official at one international aid organisation said Thailand and Vietnam were destinations for smuggled girls "but, as far as I know, not western Europe or the US". Official Chinese media openly report on the problem of trafficking of women and children within China.