A 34-year-old Chinese man, Mao Yin has been reunited with his biological parents 32 years after he was kidnapped.
Reports say Mao was two in 1988 when he was snatched at a hotel in Xi’an in central Shaanxi province.
He was then sold to a couple in neighbouring Sichuan province and they raised him as theirs, even renaming him Gu Ningning.
However, the police were able to trace him, 32 years after, using facial recognition technology.
According to CCTV, the police “aged” a photo of Mao as a child which enabled them to narrow the searches for close matches in the national database.
This followed a tipoff that someone in the Sichuan province had bought a child in the 80s.
The missing child, who has since grown to become a home decorator in Sichuan, was found and reunited with his birth parents.
Before then, DNA tests proved that the Xi’an couple were the biological parents.
At a reunion party organised by the Xi’an police, Mao’s mother, Li Jingzhi, burst out in tears.
She said she had never given up on finding him.
Li said that after he was taken, she quit her job and sent over 100,000 flyers to officials and appeared on several TV channels to appeal for his return.
“I don’t want him to leave me anymore. I won’t let him leave me anymore,” Mao’s mother told CCTV.
The young man himself has vowed to relocate to Xi’an to be with his birth parents.
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