Story By: John Feng, Sub-Editor: Joseph Golder, Agency: Asia Wire Report
Video Credit: AsiaWire
This footage – seen 10 million times online – shows a suspected kidnapper in a nurse’s uniform abducting a baby girl from a hospital just hours after she was born.
CCTV footage shows the alleged abductor, surnamed Li, wandering around the corridors of the maternity ward before walking out of a room with the newborn in her arms at 5:28 am local time on 8th December – 56 hours before her arrest.
Authorities in the county of Huishui in south-western China’s Guizhou Province were alerted to the suspected kidnapping by the girl’s mother, Chen Mingxin, and her husband Mr Lu.
The couple were reportedly among 10 people, including three other new mums, who were resting in the room at Lianjiang Hospital at the time of the kidnapping.
Ms Chen and Mr Lu said they would offer a cash reward of up to 100,000 RMB (10,780 GBP) for any information about their missing daughter, before Huishui police announced that they had found and arrested Li in her rental home just 300 feet away on the afternoon of 10th December.
The couple were then reunited with their daughter, who was found healthy and unharmed.
Recalling the scare, Mr Lu said he and his wife had been fast asleep in the early hours of the morning, with their daughter – born late the previous night – resting on his spouse’s bed.
They woke to find their daughter missing, and hospital nurses clueless as to her possible whereabouts.
An inspection of the CCTV footage showed the suspect wearing a nurse uniform and surgical mask, but further questions were raised when the hospital said she was not one of its nursing staff.
Ms Chen told local media: “I woke up and my daughter was gone.
“The mother in the bed next to mine said she was carried away by a woman in a nurse uniform.
“I wondered why she didn’t tell me, but she thought the woman was a real nurse.
“The suspect actually wanted to take her baby, but she wasn’t successful because she woke up.
“That’s when she decided to take mine instead.”
Ms Chen claims the hospital changing room, which is full of nurse uniforms, is not locked and can be accessed by any members of the public.
She added: “She spent 40 minutes in the changing room.
“When she took my baby away, another nurse saw her too. She saw it with her own eyes, but she didn’t say a word.”
Huishui police were still investigating the case at the time of writing.
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