Police arrested 11 people in connection with digging up corpses for ghost marriages in China.
The custom, which dates back to the 17th century B.C., required a dead woman's body to buried alongside a newly deceased bachelor so he will have someone with him in the after life, reports South China Morning Post. Grave robbers often steal women's corpses and sell them to families buring an unmarried man.
"Years-old carcasses are not worth a damn, while the ones that have just died, like this one, are valuable," Wang, the lead suspect who was only identified by his last name, said in a clip aired in a Shandong Radio and Television news broadcast, referring to the body of a woman unearthed three months after she was buried. "They could be sold for somewhere between 16,000 and 20,000 yuan [$2,000-$3,000]."
Stealing corpses in China is a criminal offense, which is punishable for up to three years in prison, reports SCMP.
The ghost marriage ritual was named as an "outdated superstition" in China, although this wasn't the first grave robber case for a ghost marriage in recent years.
In 2009 a team of grave robbers sold the remains of a teenaged girl who recently committed suicide to a family to be buried next to their bachelor son who died in a car accident, reports SCMP. In 2011 a man was sentenced to death for murdering a pregnant woman to sell to a family for a ghost marriage.
