Police in east China's Anhui Province have arrested 10 suspects for allegedly beating and forcing 32 mentally-handicapped people working in brick kilns in slave-like conditions.

Gao Jie, director of the Jieshou Public Security Bureau, said Friday that 80 police raided the kilns in Jeishou City on April 28 and freed the victims.

"All of them are mentally handicapped people aged between 25 and 45. Few of them can tell where they were from," said Gao.

He said the police helped 19 of them find their homes, and the remaining 13 had been temporarily sheltered in a welfare house in Jieshou, waiting for the families to pick them up.

"We have put their photographs on the bureau's website. Maybe their relatives are looking for them, and they may find the information on the Internet," said Gao.

Among the 10 suspects are brick kiln owner Zhang and nine of his foremen.

Police say the people were forced into hard labor for more than 10 hours a day without pay. Some of them were found to have been beaten.

Gao said police were still investigating the case, looking for evidence of the possible trafficking of mentally handicapped people.

"We have sent detectives to Shandong to continue the investigation, as the case here will be transferred to the procuratorate next week," said Gao.

Zhang told police he "bought" the laborers from neighboring Shandong Province.

"Zhang said he bought them for 200 to 300 yuan each from a taxi driver, who frequently sold mentally handicapped people to him. The driver claimed that he found these people roaming on street," said Gao.

The workers came from Anhui, Shandong, Henan, Hunan, Hubei and other provinces.

Jieshou, 400 km north of Anhui's capital of Hefei, is on the border of Anhui and Henan provinces. Zhang bought the handicapped people from Shandong, and chose the border region to run the kiln to evade police, said Gao, adding the kilns began operating last month.

Zhang Junjie, a spokesman of the city government of Jieshou, said the government would do its utmost to care for the handicapped sheltered in the welfare house before their relatives came to pick them up.

Another forced-labor scandal made headlines in 2007, when a brick kiln boss in northern Shanxi Province was found to have forced 1,340 people to work, 367 of whom were mentally handicapped.

In the wake of the scandal, 95 officials in the province were punished, and 29 brick kiln bosses, foremen, supervisors and other workers were tried by courts in seven separate cases. The principal was given the death penalty and the others received jail terms.

(Xinhua News Agency May 22, 2009)