Chinese authorities have arrested 11 people in the eastern
province of Shandong for digging up bodies of dead women to be sold as “ghost
brides,” the South China Morning Post reports.
The custom of ghost marriage,
still practiced in many parts of rural China, involves burying a woman next to
an unmarried man who has recently died so he may have a companion in the
afterlife.
The arrested men in this case reportedly excavated a
Shandong woman’s body from her grave in March, selling it to a middleman for
the equivalent of nearly $3,000.
The main suspect, surnamed Wang, said in an
interview that the value of the bodies went up if they were exhumed and sold
closer to death, using the example of a woman disinterred three months after
her passing.
“Years-old carcasses are not worth a damn, while the ones
that have just died, like this one, are valuable,” Wang said.
Stealing corpses is a criminal offense in China, which can
result in up to three years in prison if convicted.
[SCMP]
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