An official at a government-run homeless shelter has been detained on suspicion of trafficking mentally retarded people to work in slave-like conditions in factories and quarries across China.

Police in southwest China's Sichuan Province said they detained Yang Junyi, an official at the Quxian County Homeless Shelter, on Tuesday for his alleged involvement in human trafficking.

The shelter's chief, Liu Dingming, was suspended for negligence of duty, according to a Quxian government statement on its website yesterday.

An investigation found Yang had cooperated with Zeng Lingquan, who owned an illegal labor agency he claimed was a shelter for homeless and disabled people. Zeng allegedly sold the people as forced laborers to factories.

Police detained Zeng, 46, for alleged illegal business dealings on December 13 after media reports said he was suspected of selling 11 homeless people, including eight who had mental disabilities, to a stone quarry in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

The laborers were fed dog food, were not given any protective clothing or equipment and were forced to grind stones into powder for up to 14 hours a day without pay before they were rescued.

Some who tried to escape were badly beaten, a Xinjiang police officer told the Xinjiang Metropolis Newspaper.

Quxian authorities said that a contract dated April 2006 showed that Yang had agreed to pay Zeng 1,000 yuan (US$150) a month for each disabled person Zeng moved from his agency to the Quxian County Homeless Shelter.

Yang would pay an extra 1,000 yuan if any of them went missing, the contract said.

An unnamed county official said Yang might have been trying to release the people from Zeng's agency, but that conflicted with what community members living near the shelter said.

They told the Oriental Morning Post that they had witnessed Yang leading teams of the center's residents to work for factories, quarries and even coal mines.

The Quxian County Homeless Shelter was established in 2003 with government funds. People there were provided with basic shelter and food and helped tend the shelter's vegetable plot and livestock, according to Wu Tao, a spokesman for the county government.

However, Oriental Morning Post reporters only spotted one boy, who said he didn't remember his name, at the shelter while the others were said to have been "relocated" by county authorities.

The boy said he had been living in a shabby basement for five years and was ordered to feed pigs in the shelter's yard. He said he didn't remember what he ate for his last meal.

The newspaper quoted residents living near the shelter as saying that the homeless were poorly treated and were not given enough to eat while being forced to work. The shelter was closed to the public and the people living inside were banned from getting out without approval.

Meanwhile, police are investigating another labor scandal after the Beijing Youth Daily revealed that 11 men had been kept captive to work for up to more than 10 hours a day in a brick factory in Shaanxi Province.

A 29-year-old laborer, Liu Xiaoping, who was said to be suffering from minor mental problems, told the newspaper that the workers would be burned by cigarettes and hit with bricks if they didn't perform well. At night, they were chained to their beds to prevent them from escaping.

Liu's brother said Liu was last seen playing at a street corner near home in Gaoling County before he disappeared for 10 months.

Liu didn't say how he had escaped from the factory.

Police are investigating the case.