China stops human smugglers in Golden Triangle

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese police have stopped a large group of migrants from crossing the border into Myanmar through the notorious Golden Triangle in what state media on Thursday said was a major case of human smuggling.

Two human smugglers, known in Chinese as "snakeheads", were arrested for trying to take 124 people out of China in two batches in early December and had "overseas backing", the official Xinhua news agency said. A third smuggler was at large.

The migrants originated from villages near China's frontier with North Korea, Xinhua said.

While the report did not specify where they were trying to get to, it said the group had been discovered in Xishaungbanna, a part of southwestern Yunnan province close to the porous borders with Myanmar and Laos.

The region is part of the Golden Triangle, a mountainous opium-producing area home to bandits, rebels and warlords.

Xinhua identified the migrants as "rural workers" and said it was the largest case of human smuggling ever uncovered in Yunnan.

The migrants had been told they would work in Yunnan, but were being tricked to cross the border by casino operators in Myanmar and were being taken there to build roads, an official who asked not to be identified told Reuters by telephone.

Numerous casinos run by drug lords and ethnic rebels, often in connivance with the Myanmar military, operate on the Myanmar side of the long border with China, catering to Chinese who are banned from gambling legally in their own country.

The migrants originated from villages near Dandong and Chaoyang in Liaoning province, Xinhua said. Dandong is a main border crossing between China and isolated North Korea.

The news agency said the migrants had been "tricked" by the snakeheads with promises of work overseas, and were now on their way back home. Many poor Chinese leave China through trafficking networks, ultimately going to Europe or the United States.

The traffic across the Yunnan border is two-way though.

In recent years China has found cases of men and women desperate to get out of poverty-struck Myanmar being smuggled into their vastly more developed northern neighbour, with some women being sold as wives to Chinese farmers.