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Boss admits to killing 'slave'
15/06/2007 11:01 - (SA)
Robert J Saiget
Beijing - A brickyard boss confessed on national television on Friday to killing a man for not working hard enough, in just one of the gruesome tales to emerge from a slave scandal that has shocked China.
State television aired grisly images of abused and emaciated workers freed from a brick factory in the city of Hongtong in Shanxi province, with some young men too weak to stand and others sporting scarred faces and backs.
Brought before the cameras by police, Zhao Yanbing matter-of-factly described how he beat to death the man, aged "57 or 58", for not working hard enough.
"His performance was bad, so I thought that I would frighten him a bit," Zhao said.
"When I raised the shovel over him I never thought that he would get up and confront me, so I slammed the shovel down on his head."
The man, identified as Liu Bao, never got up again, the report said.
"If the workers tried to escape we would track them down and beat them," Zhao said.
Police said on Friday more than 450 people have been rescued in recent days and up to 1 000 may still be in captivity in brickyards and coal mines in Shanxi and Henan provinces in north-central China.
Workers in Hongtong attested to the cruel conditions, with one saying it was impossible to escape the work camp. Another while: "We tried to escape but failed."
'It was always very dangerous'
Video of the camp showed squalid huts with no toilets where the workers slept on stacks of bricks on the filthy floor.
"They would lock the workers up at night in the huts, where they would have to urinate where they slept," a policeman said.
Other images showed one young boy about 10 or 12 years old stacking bricks while older "slaves" hauled wheelbarrows of bricks from the kiln.
"The labourers were enticed or sent by human traffickers to the kilns, but upon arrival were beaten, starved and forced to work long hours without payment," the official Xinhua news agency said on Thursday.
After so many children went missing, groups of parents began searching on their own after repeated appeals to local police for help went unanswered.
Chai Wei, father of a 17-year-old boy who went missing in early April, searched many brickyards with other parents of missing children.
"It was always very dangerous," Chai told the Beijing News.
"The brickyards all had people who were in charge of beatings. The children that were rescued always speak of being beaten with clubs.
"Inside the brickyards you would see children with all kinds of scars, some were still bleeding, others had scabs."
Chai said at one kiln, workers were burned on their backs with hot bricks if they tried to escape.
- AFP
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