Zambia extradites Chinese citizen for selling children's exploitative videos
Jul 20, 2022
Washington [US], July 20 : Zambian authorities have handed over a Chinese citizen to Malawi after he ran away from the country last month due to the allegations of selling exploitative videos of Malawian children to China, media reported.
Malawi police sources on Sunday said that Lu Ke was handed over to them on Saturday night in the Mchinji district of the country which borders Zambia by their counterparts.
"He is in police custody. He was handed over by our friends from Zambia. As of now he has been charged with trafficking in persons, but other charges may be added," Malawi Police Service deputy spokesperson Harry Namwaza said.
An investigation by British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) revealed Lu Ke was recording young villagers in central Malawi and making them say racist things about themselves in Mandarin, Voice of America (VOA) reported.
Police were looking for him after the investigation, however, Lu Ke fled to Zambia.
In one such video some children speaking in Mandarin are heard referring to themselves as "black monsters" and describing themselves as people with "low IQ".
The videos were sold for USD 70 each to a Chinese website and the children in the video were paid 50 cents each, VOA reported citing BBC.
Several Malawi rights organizations held street protests against the videos and they submitted a petition to the Chinese Embassy in Lilongwe.
The protestors asked the Chinese government to compensate the children as they were fooled to say words in a language they did not know.
These protests were led by University of Malawi Child Rights Legal Clinic President Comfort Mankhwazi.
Mankhwazi expressed happiness over the extradition and said, "Because we feel like this is one of those things we had in our petition, what we wanted, and we got that. We truly hope that this extradition and the arrest will lead to something big like the prosecution in our courts and finally those victims will be able to get justice they deserve."
Chinese authorities have not yet commented over the extradition, but Lu Ke's police spokesperson Namwaza is expected to appear in court soon.
