Chinese Girl Smuggled Into the US Vanishes After Getting off School Bus
Yuan Xia Wang had been placed with a foster family after a Thai man falsely claimed to be her uncle at Dulles International Airport.
On August 25, 1998, immigration authorities at the Dulles International Airport in Virginia caught a Thai national smuggling a little girl into the United States.
After landing on a United Airlines flight from Paris, Chaichana Klaharn claimed the child was his niece and presented a real but altered Thai passport as her identification.
Thai translators tried talking to 12-year-old Yuan Xia Wang, but she didn’t understand them. Only when a Mandarin Chinese-speaking official approached her could she tell them what happened. Yuan explained that, seven days earlier, her parents in Fuzhou, China, had paid Chaichana a significant amount of money to take her to the US.
Chaichana eventually admitted that he had met with Yuan in Bangkok and that a man named Chan Chai gave him airline tickets to Brussels and money for train and plane tickets to Paris and the US. He was supposed to deliver the girl to the Holiday Inn at 15th Street and Rhode Island Avenue NW in Washington DC and claimed he didn’t know what would happen to her afterward.
