BEIJING – SEVEN people in southwest China, including four government officials, are being tried on charges of raping schoolgirls, allegedly aided by a former prostitute, state media said on Wednesday.

The suspects are all accused of raping girls of primary and secondary school age in Guizhou province from October 2007 to July 2008, helped by a jobless woman and her two teenage friends, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Yuan Yunqin, a communist party official in Xishui, where the trial is taking place, said the 37-year-old woman ‘knew many influential people in town because she used to be a prostitute and ran an inn’, according to Xinhua.

Mr Yuan said the men were allowed to rape the girls for roughly 100 yuan (S$22) each.

‘She offered her own apartment as a hospitality venue, helped find clients and took 30 per cent of the income,’ Mr Yuan was quoted as saying.

Her two teenage accomplices, who were drug addicts and needed money, helped by abducting schoolgirls from one primary school and three junior high schools in the county, Xinhua cited Mr Yuan as saying.

The two, who are 14 and 15 years old, have been locked up in a local juvenile detention centre, Xinhua said.

The woman was arrested after the scandal emerged in August, but prosecutors did not have enough evidence to charge her with kidnapping or coerced prostitution, and it is not known when she will be tried, the report said.

The scandal was uncovered when a victim’s mother reported to police that her daughter had been raped, Xinhua quoted Mr Yuan as saying.

In October, police arrested the seven suspects, who include officials in charge of land and resources, social security and legal affairs. One other man was a teacher.

The local court and police in Xishui were not immediately available for comment. — AFP

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