Two women jailed for trafficking teenage girls to China as brides

The Nghe An People's Court found Luong Thi Khay, 37, and Lo Thi Thanh, 33, guilty of trafficking two 14-year-old girls to China in July 2012.

The two unidentified girls had asked Thanh to take them to China for work. But she and Khay contacted Vi Thi Hue, a local who had moved to China, and told her they had found brides for selling in that country and trafficked the two girls.

In China, they were sold for 60,000 yuan ($8,700) each. Hue paid Khay VND100 million ($4,323), and the latter kept VND20 million each for herself and Thanh and gave the girls' families VND30 million each.

Seven years later the two girls managed to escape back to Vietnam and reported to the police.

Besides their jail sentences, Thanh and Khay also have to pay VND25 million to each of girls' families as compensation, the court said.

Vietnam is a human trafficking hotspot with the crime worth tens of billions of dollars annually, according to the Ministry of Public Security.

The country has recorded over 3,400 victims of human trafficking since 2013, over 90 percent of them women, children and people from ethnic minority communities.

Eighty percent of victims end up in China, which suffers from one of the worst gender imbalances due to its one-child policy and illegal abortion of female fetuses by parents who preferred sons, leading to increasing trafficking of Vietnamese women and baby girls to that country.