Chinese mum fakes son’s kidnapping to test husband’s love
- Child found safe and well at relative’s house
- Online community response a mix of relief and outrage
Police have accused the mother of an 11-year-old boy who went missing in eastern China for more than five days of staging a hoax after the child was found at a relative’s house.
The boy, surnamed Huang, was found safe and well late on Tuesday evening, but his disappearance was a deliberately created false alarm, according to a statement on Wednesday from police in Yueqing, Zhejiang province.
The boy's mother, a 33-year-old woman surnamed Chen, has been detained on suspicion of “creating and deliberately spreading false information”, according to police.
The woman, who had been in an argument with her husband, had “deliberately planned and created this false alarm” as a way of testing whether her husband really cared about her and her son, police said.
The police investigation found Chen met her son after school and told him to wait in another car while she filed a fake report to the police on Friday evening.