POLICE RETURNED THE WRONG BOY
In 1992, nurse Zhu Xiaojuan and her husband, Cheng, were devastated when their one-year-old son, called Panpan, was abducted by his nanny.
The little boy had been in the nanny, He Xiaoping’s care for just a few days when she fled with him and couldn’t be found.
Bereft, Zhu searched for her boy, but it wasn’t until 1995 that police had a breakthrough. A threeyear-old boy found with child traffickers was believed to be him.
Zhu wasn’t sure, but Cheng was excited and when a DNA test proved to be a match, the family had a joyous reunion.
Then, 25 years later, their former nanny came forward to confess to the abduction.
She explained she’d taken the boy after her first two children had died in infancy.
Being from the country, villagers told her that if she raised another family’s child, she’d fall pregnant with her own.
So she’d accepted the job as a nanny, stolen the baby and fled, renaming him Liu Jinxin.
But she had a bombshell for the family... Liu was
still in her care.
If the couple’s long-lost son had spent his whole life with his nanny, then who on earth was the boy they’d been handed by authorities?
A second DNA test confirmed the young man, now 26, was not Zhu’s biological son. The first test had been botched.
‘Because of the false report, I stopped looking for my own son and raised a stranger’s boy,’ Zhu said. ‘And he also missed the chance to be reunited with his own biological parents.’
The true identity of the ‘imposter’ Liu is yet to be discovered. But Liu said he didn’t want the nanny who had raised him as her own to be locked up.
‘She has been so nice to me, just like a real mum,’ he explained.