MAZAIKEWALE, Pakistan (AP) — Sold by her family as a bride to a Chinese man, Samiya David spent only two months in China. When she returned to Pakistan, the once robust woman was nearly unrecognizable: malnourished, too weak to walk, her speech confused and disjointed.
"Don't ask me about what happened to me there" was her only reply to her family's questions, her cousin Pervaiz Masih said.
Within a few weeks, she was dead.
David's death adds to a growing body of evidence of mistreatment and abuses against Pakistani women and girls, mainly Christians, who have been trafficked to China as brides.
Associated Press investigations have found that traffickers have increasingly targeted Pakistan's impoverished Christian population over the past two years, paying desperate families to give their daughters and sisters, some of them teenagers, into marriage with Chinese men.
In China, the women are often isolated, neglected, abused and sold into prostitution, frequently contacting home to plead to be brought back. Some women have told The Associated Press and activists that their husbands at times refused to feed them.
A list attained by the AP documented 629 Pakistani girls and women sold to China as brides in 2018 and early 2019. The list was compiled by Pakistani investigators working to break up the trafficking networks. But officials close to the investigation and activists working to rescue the women say that government officials, fearful of hurting Pakistan's lucrative ties to Beijing, have stifled the investigations.
"These poor people have given their daughters for money, and (in China) they do whatever they want to do with them. No one is there to see what happens to the girls," said Samiya's cousin, Masih. "This is the height of cruelty. We are poor people."
David's death at 37 shows the extreme cruelties trafficked women face. Other women have described being cut off without support, abused physically and mentally. The AP spoke to seven girls who were raped repeatedly when forced into prostitution. Activists say they have received reports of at least one trafficked bride killed in China but have been unable to confirm it.
David is buried in an unmarked grave in a small Christian graveyard overgrown with weeds near her ancestral village of Mazaikewale in Pakistan's eastern Punjab province.
Before her marriage, she lived in a cramped two-room house with her brother Saber and her widowed mother in Francisabad Colony, a congested Christian neighborhood of small cement and brick houses in a warren of narrow streets in the Punjab city of Gujranwala. Christians are among the poorest people in Pakistan, a mostly Muslim nation of 220 million people.
At the urging of a pastor, her brother took money from brokers to force her into marriage with a Chinese man. The pastor has since been arrested on suspicion of working with traffickers. A few months after their marriage in late 2018, David and her husband left to China.
"When she left for China she was healthy. She looked good and strong," Masih said.
Her husband was from a relatively poor, rural part of eastern Shandong province that has long struggled with lawlessness. The conservative culture in such areas strongly favors male offspring, which under China's strict population control policies meant that a great deal of little girls were never born, hence the demand for trafficked foreign wives. China has about 34 million more men than women.