Pakistan Samiya David looks lifeless, ill, speaks unclearly and is often short of breath.

"Don't ask what happened there" is the only question the Pakistani girl answers family members' questions.

After a few weeks, David died. David's mysterious death continues to add evidence of abuse and abuse against Pakistani women sold to China as commodities.

AP investigations have found that traffickers in the past two years have tended to target poor Pakistani Catholic communities, paying desperate families to give their daughters and girls. , some still in adolescence, marry Chinese men.

When they arrive in China, these women are often isolated, abandoned, abused and sold into prostitution. Some people tell their husbands not even even feeding them sometimes.

A list that the AP collected showed that 629 Pakistani women were sold to China as brides in 2018 and early 2019. The list was compiled by Pakistani investigators. But officials knowledgeable about the campaign to crack down on human trafficking networks and activists to help rescued women sold as brides fear that the risk of damaging China-Pakistan relations could hinder efforts. Investigation force.

"Poor families have to sell their daughters for money and in China, they are free to do anything with them. No one is there to witness what the girls suffer," said cousin Pervaiz Masih. of David, said.

The death of David at the age of 37 has exposed the extreme crime suffered by trafficked women. Other women reported being cut off from contact with the outside world and without any support, physically and mentally abused. Many young girls are constantly raped.

David is now buried under an unnamed grave at a Catholic cemetery near the ancient village of Mazaikewale in Punjab province, eastern Pakistan.

Before she got married, she lived in a cramped two-room house with her brother Saber and her mother in Francisabad Colony, a densely populated residential area in the city of Gujranwala.

Urged by a local pastor, his brother David received money from brokers to force his younger sister to marry a Chinese man. The pastor was arrested on charges of cooperating with traffickers. A few months after the wedding late last year, David and her husband left Pakistan for China.

"When she left, she was healthy. She looked very good and full of life," Masih recalled.

David's husband is from a relatively poor rural area in Shandong Province. The conservative culture in these areas values men more than women. With China's strict population control policy, people often choose to have only boys, so over time, the demand for foreign wives is increasing. Overall, Chinese men are 34 million more than women.

After two months in China, David's brother received a phone call telling him to pick up his sister at Lahore airport. David returned in a wheelchair, too weak to walk by herself.

The AP met David at the end of April. At the small house in the residential area of Rancisabad Colony, she showed reporters wedding photos taken six months ago. In one photo, she wore a white wedding dress, smiling brightly, looking energetic, with long, black hair.

David met AP reporters who looked different from the woman in the picture. Her cheeks were sunken, her complexion darkened, her face was haggard, her body was skin and bones. She did not seem very lucid, her words were incoherent.

Before questions about the wedding or the time in China, David appeared distracted, the words were not clear, sometimes, she suddenly stood up to make tea, her mouth kept mumbling. She walked away, repeatedly saying "I'm fine, I'm fine". When asked why she looked so different from the wedding photo, David looked into nothingness and finally said "nothing bad has happened to me".

"She has the eyes of the devil," his brother David described. On May 1, she died.

Doctor Meet Khan Tareen treated David once she went to his clinic in Lahore. According to the doctor, she was severely malnourished, anemic and jaundiced, so her physical condition was very weak. Early tests showed David could have a number of diseases, including organ failure. The doctor asked her brother to allow her to be hospitalized.

"She was very, very, very light weight," he emphasized.

David's death certificate said her death had a "natural" cause. Her brother refused to talk to the police about his brother. When the AP contacted in November, he said there was no autopsy, and he lost documents related to the wedding, a copy of the husband's passport and photos that David had given. AP see.

David's cousin said the family was hiding the truth because they sold her. "They took the money, so they had to hide everything," Masih said.

Catholic activist Salim Iqbal, one of the first to alert the bride trade, contacted some Pakistani women in China through groups on the WeChat messaging app. According to Iqbal, a girl recently told him that her husband did not provide her with food and medicine.

Another woman, Samia Yousaf, forced to get married at 24 years old, also told the AP about the horizontal results she suffered in China.

Yousaf went to China with her husband after she became pregnant. Upon arrival, everything was completely different from what her husband promised. Her husband is not rich. They live in a small room on the edge of the field with lots of spiders.

After giving birth, her husband's sister did not even let her hug her. The husband also wouldn't let her breastfeed unless the doctor didn't intervene. Unable to walk on his own, the doctor asked Yousaf's husband to take her for a walk, but he repeatedly let her fall and did not help her to stand up.

Leaving the hospital home, Yousaf continued to be mistreated. The husband does not let her eat. "He is really cruel. I think he wants to kill me," she said.

Three weeks later, authorities threatened to incarcerate Yousaf because her visa had expired. The husband holds her passport. Scared and sick, Yousaf begged her husband to let her and her son return home to Pakistan.

However, he refused to give her the baby. Yousaf discovered her name was not written on the child's birth certificate but only her husband's name. The last time she met her son was in September 2017, before she returned home.

"Every day I think of you," Yousaf said. "I wonder what my child will look like. My heart is always in grief."