HOPE FOR MADDIE
A COUPLE whose son was abducted 32 years ago has been reunited with him after decades of searching and pain.
The case has given hope to thousands of families who have searched for years for their lost children, like the McCann's.
Mao Yin's family has spent the last three decades looking all over China for him after he was snatched on October 17, 1988, aged two, when his dad stopped to get him some water on the way home from nursery in the city of Xian in Shaanxi province.
The family was finally reunited at a police news conference on Monday, the BBC reports.
Mao Yin, now 34, said he planned to spend time with his parents.
His mum, Li Jingzhi, quit her job to look for her boy. She personally distributed more than 100,000 flyers across 10 provinces and was on TV to appeal for help during their 32-year search for her son, including the Chinese version of X-Factor.
Her incredible work led to her reuniting 29 children with their families during her journey to reunite her own after joining charity Baby Come Back Home.
She previously described her son as a "very clever, cute, and healthy" baby.
"I would like to thank the tens of thousands of people who helped us," she said.
Chinese state media says that in April police received a tip about a man from Sichuan Province in south-west China, about 620 miles from Xian who had adopted a baby years earlier.
They then conducted a DNA test on the adoptee, who had been renamed Gu Ningning and runs a home decoration business, and found he was a perfect match.
Police said he had been sold as a boy to a childless couple for 6,000 yuan (£690, $840 in today's money).
Mrs Li was told the good news on 10 May - Mother's Day in China. "This is the best gift I have ever got," she said.
The investigation into the 1988 disappearance is still ongoing. The authorities have not released information about the couple who raised Mao Yin.
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Mrs Li's charity, Baby Come Back Home, has 14,893 posts looking for missing boys, and 7,411 looking for girls on their website, however there are no official figures on the number of missing children in China.
According to Global Missing Kids, in the United Kingdom, an estimated 112,853 children are reported missing every year.
In many countries, the statistics are not available or are very unreliable, but global estimates sit at well above a million under 18's vanishing every year.
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