An alleged human trafficking gang, all insiders at the Capital International Airport, will be put on trial in Beijing on charges of attempting to smuggle 26 Chinese overseas between 2006 and 2007.

Led by a 25-year-old airport security worker, the 12-man group was uncovered on Dec 12 when customs officers stopped four stowaways from Fujian province while they tried to board an Air China flight bound for Vancouver, the Beijing Times reported on Friday.

The group also kept close contact with human traffickers in Fujian and Hong Kong and gained hundreds of thousands of yuan for each successful attempt, the newspaper said.

Each stowaway reportedly paid around 500,000 yuan ($73,000) to the traffickers.

The four stowaways allegedly skipped the security checks inside airport terminals by hiding in a special vehicle provided by the gang. Drivers employed by the group then drove them directly to their plane minutes before the take-off, the paper reported.

Customs officers found that the names on the boarding passes slipped into the stowaways' hands by four Singaporean collaterals did not match the names on the fake passports held by the stowaways and decided to arrest them on the scene.

The newspaper reported that among 26 Chinese the group tried to smuggle in eight attempts between 2006 and 2007, 13 succeeded. All were bound for Canada.

Three South Korean students, from the prestigious Tsinghua University and Renmin University of China in Beijing were also investigated along with the four Singaporean nationals for switching their tickets with the stowaways so the smugglers were able to board the plane under their names.

Leaders of human trafficking groups and those involved in multiple attempts at human trafficking face possible lifetime prison terms.

Beijing recorded a 7.8 percent drop of human trafficking cases last year from 2007, its customs authority said on Thursday.

However, human trafficking in major cities is still a big issue in China, sources told China Daily on Friday.

Besides Beijing, Shanghai is also becoming an increasingly popular port for illegal migration, the Shanghai municipal public security bureau said.

One court in Jinshan District alone tried 32 cases of immigration fraud since 2005, 11 of them in the last year.

Last month, local prosecutors approved the arrest of nine individuals who allegedly organized 20 farmers from Fujian, Zhejiang and Jilin provinces trying to travel from the Shanghai Pudong International Airport holding fake identities.

(China Daily January 10, 2009)