Language barrier stumps Chinese detainee’s interrogators

For five days, the Chittoor police have been trying to extract information from Chinese red sanders buyer Yang Ping but have found him a tough nut to crack. Part of the reason is that he does not understand their questions and they don’t understand his answers. The sum and substance of what they have been able to get from him is his insistence “I am Chinese, a foreigner. Indian police cannot punish me.”

The task force set up to crack down on red sanders smuggling in the Seshachalam forests had nabbed Yang on the outskirts of Hyderabad on May 7. They won custody of him last week and lodged him in the Chittoor jail.

With his remand ending in a couple of days, his interrogators are getting a bit frantic. One investigating officer told

The Hindu that the language barrier is hampering the grilling. Stumped by the communication gap, they have had to turn to English-Chinese translation software. “But the results have been less than 70 per cent,” said the officer.

A Chinese woman, named Jojo, who was believed to have accompanied Yang during his travels to metropolitan cities in India, has now returned to China. Police have learnt that the two, along with some red sanders smugglers from the Rayalaseema districts, visited Mumbai, Chennai, New Delhi, Kolkata, and Bengaluru. “We have noted the entries in Yang’s passport, which give scope for serious doubts. He accepts that he is a buyer of red sanders but denies having any links with smugglers. He is arguing that what he was doing was perfectly legal ,” the investigator said.

A Sub-Inspector of the task force told The Hindu : “Sometimes he laughs, affects innocence, and contradicts his own versions.”

Joint interrogation of Yang and his accomplice Srinivasa Raju of Rayachoti has so far revealed that they visited a red sanders dump in Bengaluru a few days before their arrest on May 7. But Yang reportedly says he knows nothing about the dump. However, he seems to be fully aware of the topography of the Seshachalam hills. “We are verifying whether his pucca idea of the region is based on knowledge gained from books, or whether he did visit the area personally,” another senior officer said.

With the aid of translation software, Yang Ping says Indian cops can’t get him