A New York woman found a letter written by a man in a Chinese prison begging for help inside a shopping bag from Saks Fifth Avenue, DNAinfo.com reported Tuesday.
Stephanie Wilson, 28, looked inside the Saks bag for her receipt when she found a hand-written letter with the words "HELP HELP HELP" written on top. The letter was from an African man who said he was wrongfully incarcerated in a Chinese prison and was forced to make paper shopping bags, including Wilson's.
"We are ill-treated and work like slaves for 13 hours every day producing these bags in bulk in the prison factory," wrote the man, from Cameroon, DNAinfo reported.
"I read the letter and I just shook," Wilson told the news site. "I could not believe what I was reading."
The Manhattan resident found the note after she bought a pair of rain boots from the high-end department store in September 2012. Wilson, originally from Australia, contacted the human rights group Laogai Research Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security about the letter, which was signed by a man named Tohnain Emmanuel Njong, DNAinfo reported.
It was only recently that Wilson shared her story with the media. The LRF was unsuccessful at finding Njong, who provided an email address that did not work and a small photograph with his letter. The DHS did not confirm if they investigated.
DNAinfo recently found a man using the email address, which now works, who identified himself as the prisoner.
Njong, who was released last December and is back in Cameroon, told the site he was wrongfully sentenced to three-years in a prison in the city of Qingdao in Shandong Province. The 34-year-old said he was an English teacher in Shenzhen when he was arrested in May 2011 on fraud charges.
In the prison, Njong was forced to work from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. making paper shopping bags, assembling electronics or sewing, DNAinfo reported. The prisoner wrote a total of five letters using pen and paper he was supposed to use to record his daily quota.
"We were being monitored all the time," Njong said. "I got under my bed cover and I wrote it so nobody could see that I was writing anything."
It is illegal under U.S. law to import products made by convicts or from slave labor, a DHS representative told DNAinfo. But there is a loophole that allows those products to be imported if they cannot be obtained any other way.
Saks, owned by the Hudson Bay Company, confirmed its bags are made in China but that it has a "zero tolerance policy" for "forced labor," DNAinfo reported.
