A man has been arrested after taking his pregnant ‘wife’ to hospital and the staff claims the ‘woman’ was 12.
She was accompanied by the 40-year-old man and another woman who claimed to be her mother-in-law.
They arrived at the Xuzhou City Central Hospital, in East China’s Jiangsu Province, claiming that the girl was three months pregnant and that she needed a routine test to confirm that her foetus was healthy.
The husband and mother-in-law said the wife was 20 years old, but medics immediately alerted local authorities when they found the young patient to be more like a schoolgirl than a “woman”.
Doctors who tried to question the girl were unable to get any answers from her.
One of the staff said: “It’s obvious she is just a child, and certainly not anywhere near 20 years old.”
Their suspicion is also said to have angered the husband, who was quoted as saying: “I took her here to be examined, just do your job. Stop asking so many questions.”
Arriving police officers found that the girl did not possess a Chinese ID and concluded that she was a foreign national from Southeast Asia, but her exact origins are still unclear.
Investigators suspect that she was abducted or bought as a foreign bride – the Chinese have a history of purchasing Vietnamese brides from across the country’s southern border.
