‘I have a home now’: China DNA match sees repentant petty criminal abducted as child reunited with parents 33 years on
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A family in China who spent more than three decades searching for their son who was abducted by human traffickers when he was four years old has finally been reunited with him, thanks to a DNA database.
Joy for the Wei family from Sichuan province in southwestern China, however, was tinged with shock as they discovered their missing boy was serving a jail term for theft in Zhejiang province in the east of the country.
The 37-year-old was identified as their long-lost son when his DNA was collected by the prison in April as part of a registration scheme.
His parents had registered their own DNA with a national network designed to help people seeking lost family members.
The man was reunited with his parents and his two sisters in the Zhejiang prison on November 20, according to Ningbo Evening News.
Using the pseudonym, Mingdong, the man said he had fallen into a life of petty crime and had been jailed four times.