Kidnapped Woman Reunited With Family After 22 Years

Story By: John FengSub-EditorJoseph Golder, Agency: Asia Wire Report

AsiaWire / Mianyang PSB

This is the moment a young woman who was kidnapped as a toddler in the 1990s is reunited with her mum and dad after 22 years.

Tang Ran, 24, who lives in Beijing, was snatched while playing outside her family’s home in the city of Mianyang, in Sichuan Province in south-western China, on 28th October 1992.

Later sold as an orphan, she ended up with a family in Xingtai, a city in Hebei Province in North China some 800 miles away.

She was just two years and nine months old at the time of her disappearance. Meanwhile, Mr Tang and his wife Ms Xiao began their decades-long search.

Ms Xiao said: “When she went missing, our entire family was hysterical.

“We spent seven days looking for her inside Mianyang Railway Station, running towards and asking about every single child that looked even a little bit like her.

“Everyone thought we were insane, and often suspected we were trying to kidnap their children.

“After so many years, I could never let her go. At the same time, I was too afraid to even touch her things.”

The couple followed up on every lead, but they never learned their missing daughter’s whereabouts.

Believing that Tang Ran would one day find her way home, the desperate parents said they never moved and refused to make any changes to the appearance of their old family home.

The Mianyang Public Security Bureau said the parents, who live in what is today the city’s Anzhou District, gave their DNA to a national missing persons database in November 2009.

It took a decade to find a match as they could only wait until their daughter’s biological data was also collected and stored.

Authorities in the Chinese capital were notified of a high probability hit when the couple’s DNA matched that of a young Beijing woman by the surname Wang.

Ms Xiao and her husband were informed in October 2019, but a second round of DNA tests were delayed by the COVID-19 epidemic in China.

The couple, accompanied by Mianyang police officer Hu Xiangyu, were flown to Beijing recently, and results were confirmed by local authorities.

After receiving consent from the couple, as well as Tang Ran and her foster family, a reunion was arranged and the young woman was reunited with her biological parents on 9th June.

Footage from the private reunion shows Ms Xiao sobbing uncontrollably as she hugs her daughter for the first time in 22 years.

Tang Ran did not reveal whether she had made any immediate plans after learning about her other family.

The chances of catching those involved in the 1992 kidnapping are also thought to be slim.

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