Abducted – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

For nearly 24 years, the father crossed China by motorbike. With banners displaying photos of a 2-year-old boy flying from the back of his bike, he traveled more than 300,000 miles, all in pursuit of one goal: finding his kidnapped son.

This week, Guo Gangtang’s search finally ended. He and his wife were reunited with their son, now 26, after the police matched their DNA, according to China’s public security ministry.

In a scene captured by Chinese state television, the trio clung to each other tearfully at a news conference on Sunday in Liaocheng, Mr. Guo’s hometown in northern Shandong Province.

“My darling, my darling, my darling,” Mr. Guo’s wife, Zhang Wenge, sobbed as she embraced the young man. “We found you, my son, my son.”

“He’s been delivered into your hands, so you need to love him well,” Mr. Guo said, trying to comfort her even as his own voice shook.

The apparent happy ending captivated China, where Mr. Guo has become something of a folk hero. His cross-country odyssey, during which he said he was thrown from his bike at least once and slept outdoors when he could not afford a hotel, inspired the 2015 film “Lost and Love,” starring the renowned Hong Kong actor Andy Lau.

After the reunion, Chinese social media filled with congratulatory messages. Hashtags about the Guo family were viewed hundreds of millions of times. “Today, ‘Lost and Love’ finally has a real happy ending,” the movie’s director, Peng Sanyuan, said in a video on Douyin, a social media app.

Child abduction is a longstanding problem in China. There are no official statistics on the number of children kidnapped each year, but officials at the Ministry of Public Security said this month that they had located 2,609 missing or abducted children so far this year. Various reports estimate the number of children abducted annually in China may be as high as 70,000.

Historically, child abduction was linked, at least in part, to China’s one-child policy. At the height of the policy’s enforcement in the 1980s and 1990s, some couples resorted to buying young boys on the black market to ensure they would have a son, according to research by scholars at Xiamen University in Fujian Province. Chinese society has traditionally favored sons.

As the central government began easing enforcement of the policy in the early 2000s — before ending it in 2015 — reported abductions fell sharply. Technological advances such as a nationwide DNA database of missing children, stiffer criminal penalties and greater public awareness of child trafficking have also helped curb the problem, said Zhang Zhiwei, executive director of an anti-trafficking center at the China University of Political Science and Law.

Still, the threat of abduction continues to weigh on many Chinese. On Monday, several police departments in the eastern city of Hangzhou issued statements denying viral rumors about attempted kidnappings.

Mr. Guo’s son, named Guo Xinzhen at birth, disappeared on Sept. 21, 1997. He had been playing at the door of his home while his mother cooked inside, according to interviews the elder Mr. Guo has given over the years.

A frantic Mr. Guo and his wife, along with family, neighbors and friends, fanned out across the region to search for the boy. But after several months, the effort waned. That was when Mr. Guo attached large banners printed with his son’s photo to the back of a motorcycle and set out to find the boy on his own.

“Son, where are you?” the banners said, alongside an image of the boy in a puffy orange jacket. “Dad is looking for you to come home.”

Over the years, Mr. Guo wore out 10 motorcycles, traveling from Hainan in the south to Henan in the north, chasing down any tidbits of information, he has said. Once, on a rainy day, a rock slipped off a truck bed in front of him, sending his motorcycle toppling. He had so many near-miss traffic incidents that he lost count. But he always set out again.

“If I’m at home, the human trafficker is not going to deliver him back to me,” he said in a 2015 interview with state television.

In 2012, Mr. Guo founded an organization to help other parents find their missing children, and he said he has helped dozens of other families find their loved ones, even as his own search remained unsuccessful. His story rose to national prominence with the 2015 film. Earlier this year he also began promoting anti-trafficking awareness on the social media app Douyin, where he had gained tens of thousands of followers even before his son was found.

The latest development in Mr. Guo’s story also seemed like something straight out of a screenwriter’s imagination.

In June, law enforcement officials in Shandong received notice of a potential match for Mr. Guo’s son in Henan Province, according to the public security ministry. It was not immediately clear how officials had identified him, though they said they had used “the newest comparison and search methods.” Further blood work confirmed that the 26-year-old man, who some local news reports said was working as a teacher, was Mr. Guo’s son.

The authorities later said that they had arrested a woman surnamed Tang and a man surnamed Hu. According to the state news media, Ms. Tang snatched the boy and delivered him to Mr. Hu, who then sold him. CCTV, the state broadcaster, said the two had confessed.

Ahead of the reunion, a dazed Mr. Guo and his wife bought more than 1,000 pounds of candy to distribute to neighbors in celebration. Mr. Guo also cleaned out his home, tossing out old belongings to commemorate a new beginning.

In an interview ahead of the reunion with Chen Luyu, a talk-show host, the parents veered between jubilation and paralysis. Sitting at their dining table, Ms. Zhang, Mr. Guo’s wife, broke down several times, wondering if their son would blame her for not watching him closely enough.

Mr. Guo said he bore no resentment toward the couple that had raised his son. How his son would treat that couple going forward was up to him, he said.

“If the child wants to be filial to his adopted parents, then you just need to openly and sincerely accept that,” he said.

State media reports said that the younger Mr. Guo had said he would continue living with the couple that had raised him, who he said had treated him well. But he said he would visit his birth parents often.

The elder Mr. Guo told Ms. Chen, the television host, that he was content with whatever the future brought.

“Our child has been found,” he said. “From now on, only happiness is left.”

DAKAR, Senegal – For six days, parents held a vigil at the school in northwestern Nigeria, where their boys, more than 300 of them, were taken away by armed men at night.

The armed men’s attack on their town of Kankara was a painful replica of the kidnapping of 276 school girls in Chibok in 2014 by the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram of the Chibok girls were not registered years later.

Families gathered at Government Science Secondary School, praying, and fearing the worst.

“We do not know whether he has eaten, whether he is sick, dead or alive,” said Abdulkadir Musbau, whose son Abdullahi was among the abductees.

But just as suddenly, when the families’ ordeal began, it seemed to end, and with the best possible news: late Thursday night, the governor of their state announced that all of the kidnapped boys had been released and would be reunited with their parents the next day.

It was unclear under what conditions the boys’ freedom had been secured. Governor Aminu Bello Masari told a Deutsche Welle television reporter that the government had not paid a ransom and that negotiations had been conducted with a group of men he described as “bandits” rather than Boko Haram.

Boko Haram had claimed the kidnappings from the start, but the group’s level of involvement was murky. Kankara is in northwest Nigeria, where the group was not known. Among terrorist experts, this opened up the possibility that the group might want to expand by making common cause with militant and criminal groups already established in the region.

The group seemed to confirm this idea when they posted a video showing some of the kidnapped boys. A boy who said he was from Kankara is shown asking the government to call the army, disband support groups and close schools. “We were caught by a gang from Abu Shekau,” he said, referring to the Boko Haram chief. “Some of us were killed.”

“You have to send them the money,” he added.

A dozen smaller boys crowded around him and added their voices. “Help us,” they called into the camera.

An audio message from a representative of Boko Haram was pinned to the end, implying some kind of collaboration between the kidnappers and the militant Islamists.

In a BBC interview that was taped before news of the release, Mr Masari said the kidnappers had contacted the father of one of the boys and asked the government to send them money.

“We have an idea where they are, but we try to make sure there is no collateral damage, that the children are brought back safely,” he said. “That’s why we step forward carefully and quietly.”

President Muhammadu Buhari won the 2015 election and pledged to take action against Boko Haram and other militant and bandit groups in northern Nigeria. And he has repeatedly promised to take every chibok student home.

“The Chibok girls are still fresh in our minds,” said Bulama Bukarti, an expert on extremist groups in Africa at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. “The difference now is that Boko Haram has fighters from outside the Northeast, they have people from the Northwest.”

The abductions have remarkable similarities. As in the Chibok attack, armed men stormed the boarding school at night, took hundreds of children, in this case all boys, and took them to hiding in the country. They were then divided into groups, according to students questioned by local media outlets who managed to escape their captors, making it difficult for security forces to conduct a rescue operation.

Mr Musbau said he was out shopping for pasta for his children’s Saturday breakfast when heavy gunfire broke out. People were running in all directions around him, so he sprinted home, passing police officers and guards on the way.

When he heard that their children’s boarding school was the focus of the attack, he and other parents ran there at dawn.

When he got to school, “I saw his neatly made bed and his box and hat over it,” said Mr. Musbau. “But not him.”

Mr. Musbau was delighted when Abdullahi, the oldest of his six children, got a place at the state science school. In elementary school he had reached the top of his class and was hoping to become a doctor when he got older.

“The reality became clear to us that our children were indeed abducted,” he said in a school phone interview he had barely left since the attack. “Everyone was hysterical. Nobody thought the bandits could do this. You have never done anything like this before. “

The attack in Kankara was the third mass kidnapping by a Nigerian school in six years: in 2018, more than 100 girls were kidnapped in the rural community of Dapchi, a northeastern town, although most of them returned home after a few days.

The kidnapping was significant both because it took place outside the known sphere of influence of Boko Haram and because it took place in the president’s home state, Katsina, when he arrived on a week-long visit.

Mr Buhari released a statement late Thursday evening welcoming the kidnapped students’ return and the cooperation between the security forces and the government of Katsina and Zamfara states.

In the statement, Mr. Buhari urged patience with his administration as they tried to clean up security incidents across the country and reiterated his promise to lobby for the release of other detainees.

Many northern Nigerians voted for Mr Buhari in 2015, thinking he would use his credentials as a former general and one-time dictator to encourage discipline and bring peace to Africa’s most populous nation.

Despite government claims, Boko Haram and other militant groups still pose a grave threat. And these recent attacks, following a nationwide uprising against police violence, insecurity and bad governance, have exposed the growing public dissatisfaction with a Nigerian government that cannot protect its people.

In the northeast, the government has pursued a strategy of building heavily protected garrison towns and largely leaving the land to the militants. More than 70 farmers trapped between the government and the extremists were killed there last month.

In Kankara, a local official said the government was aware of the worsening situation but had done nothing to resolve it.

“These bandits are well known, as are their families,” said the official, who asked for anonymity because he had been instructed not to speak to journalists. “Why were they treated with children’s gloves until they were monstrous and difficult to contain?”