The head of a hospital in China has been detained as part of an investigation into whether it worked with gangs to give kidnapped youngsters new identities, China Central Television reported.

Officials in Xiangyang, Hubei province, said earlier they were looking into a social media user’s claim that the head of Jianqiao Hospital was using the Internet to collude with unnamed people to sell birth certificates and other paperwork to traffickers operating across 10 provinces that sold children.

The social media user said that the documents cost some 96,000 yuan , and the process of getting them for a child could be completed within seven days. It wasn’t immediately clear how many children were involved.

The social media user did not immediately respond to messages from Bloomberg News seeking comment. Phone calls to the hospital weren’t answered.

The People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, said in a commentary Nov 7 that officials would “investigate and deal with the matter seriously with impartiality” and the public would get an explanation.

There were some signs the birth certificate scandal is touching a nerve with the Chinese public. The hashtag on Weibo has been viewed some 200 million times as of Tuesday afternoon.

The Chinese government has redoubled efforts in recent years to clamp down on child abductions. The problem was rampant in the decades after the reform period started around 1978 when rule of law was weaker and families moved around the country more for work, leaving children unsupervised.

The Ministry of Public Security said last year that cases involving trafficking of women and child abduction were down some 88% over the previous decade.

The ministry set up a system called Tuan Yuan, or Reunion, in 2016 that sent out broad alerts to help law enforcement find missing youngsters. Then in 2021, China launched a 10-year action plan to further deal with human trafficking and kidnappings.

 - Bloomberg