Three underage girls went missing in Guizhou, with the youngest being only 12 years old and the oldest being 14. One of the girls’ mobile phones was last tracked to Jiangsu, and there has been no trace of her since.
It was reported by Jiupai News that the three missing girls are Li Zixuan, 12 years old, Wang Yuhao, 14 years old, and Li Xinling, also 14 years old.
Li Zixuan and Wang Yuhao’s parents work outside the home for a long time, leaving them as left-behind children who have been living with their grandparents.
According to “People’s Concern,” at the end of July this year, 12-year-old Li Zixuan from Taiping Village in Qiannan Prefecture, Guizhou, told her family that she was going to play at a classmate’s house and assured her grandmother that she would come back on August 28 to focus on studying and not go out anymore. However, by September 1, the start of school, Li Zixuan still hadn’t returned.
Surveillance footage showed that on the night of August 30, Zixuan was seen in Fuquan City, but there have been no leads since. What made her family suspicious was that Zixuan later contacted them using a new WeChat account, but her grandmother felt something was amiss: “I’m not sure if the person messaging us on WeChat is her; maybe someone else is controlling her and sending messages. The way she talks doesn’t seem like her.”
Later, Li Zixuan’s family traced her phone to Jiangsu, thousands of miles away. How could a child who had just graduated from elementary school, with no ID and little money, end up in Jiangsu alone? The more the family thought about it, the more frightened they became, so they issued a missing person notice. That’s when they learned that two other girls, Wang Yuhao and Li Xinling, both 14 years old, had also gone missing with no contact. And the timing of all three disappearances was very close.
The incident has sparked attention on social media. Netizens have been speculating that a 12-year-old child lacks the ability to protect themselves. Perhaps they were deceived while chatting online and meeting people in private.
On September 7, officials from the Fuquan City Public Security Bureau announced that all three children have been found, with two of them already back home. The one who had been missing the longest, Li Zixuan, has also been contacted.
However, netizens still find the whole situation suspicious. “Three underage girls going missing one after the other for about a month definitely raises questions. Where did they go and what were they doing?,” “Where did the police find them?,” “Is there something hidden that isn’t being reported?”