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BEIJING: An alleged ringleader in a slave labor
scandal that has shocked China expressed little remorse for beating
workers and denied responsibility for a brutal brickyard murder,
state press said Monday.
“I felt it was a fairly small
thing, hitting and swearing at the workers and not giving them
wages,” the Shiyan Evening News quoted brickyard boss Heng Tinghan
as saying following his arrest Saturday.
Heng, 42, is accused of employing
32 slave laborers at a brick kiln he ran for the son of a local
Communist Party chief in Shanxi province.
He was placed on China’s most
wanted list last week and arrested Saturday in central Hubei
province, where he had fled.
Heng’s brickyard was one of
thousands of small mines, smelters and brickworks that police
stormed in Shanxi as part of the slave labor investigation, the
English-language China Daily reported.
Police have so far detained 168
people linked to human trafficking networks supplying the slaves to
the province and neighboring Henan, Xinhua news agency said Sunday.
A total of 568 people, including
children and the mentally handicapped, had been freed from slavery
in the past few days, it said.
The state-controlled press has so
far focused Heng’s Hongtong city kiln as one of the worst
transgressors. It was owned by the son of Wang Dongyi, the party
chief of Caosheng village, where the brickyard was located.
According to the Shanxi’s
public security bureau Wang’s son, Wang Bingbing has denied any
knowledge of abuse at the brickyard, saying he only paid Heng
100,000 yuan ($13,150) a year for bricks.
Heng did apologize to the
workers, but denied that he had anything to do with the killing of a
worker at the kiln and blamed a subordinate, Zhao Yanbing, the
Shiyan Evening News report said.
On Friday, Zhao confessed on
national television to killing the victim for not working hard
enough.
“The dead man had nothing to do
with me, it was Zhao Yanbing that beat him to death, at the time I
was in my hometown,” Heng said.
“[After returning] I told them
why didn’t you resolve this issue by reporting it to the
police?”
 --AFP
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