Chinese netizens reacted angrily on Wednesday to news of the dumping of toxic chemicals in the eastern province of Anhui, reported in official media three days after the event.
Police in two counties near Bozhou city detained six people in connection with the dumping of 22 tons of dichlorobenzene and related chemicals in Lixin and Guoyang counties, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday.
"Six suspects are now in police custody," the agency reported, adding that the cleanup operation had finished on Sunday.
Tests had revealed the dumped chemicals, which had turned nearby waterways black, were "capable of causing poisoning resulting in death or cancer," Xinhua said, in a brief report that was re-posted hundreds of times on the popular microblogging service Sina Weibo.
"Worthless profiteers, do you not have children?" commented user @jiutianer999.
"Can't China sort out companies like that?" added @linjimenxia.
Others were more cynical: "Guys, this is China, a dictatorship," wrote @wengqiutiandeyu. "What power do we little guys have to tell people what to do?"
"Their dad was probably Li Gang," the user added, in a reference to the son of a Baoding police chief who shouted his father's name after a drunken hit-and-run accident in which he killed one woman and injured another.
'Not from around here'
An official who answered the phone at the Lixin county environmental protection department said the people involved in the dumping weren't hired by a local firm.
"I heard about this," the official said. "But these waste products didn't come from around here."
"They were transported here from down south."
But he said officials were still unsure exactly where the chemicals came from.
"We don't have any industries like that around here, no chemical factories of that kind," he said.
An official who answered the phone at the Lixin county propaganda department declined to give any details other than those that were already in the Xinhua report.
"We are pretty busy right now, wrapping up ahead of the Lunar New Year," the official said. "We are in the middle of dealing with this incident."
Rare report
Zhejiang-based environmental activist Chen Faqing said the Anhui dumping was rare only in that it got reported.
"There are lots of incidents like this, and ... the media don't report most of them," he said, adding that the motivation for the dumping was likely to save money.
"It costs quite a bit to dispose properly of such chemical materials," Li said. "There are some unscrupulous companies that choose to dump harmful chemicals on the quiet in other regions and provinces to make a bigger profit."
He said such cases often go unreported in the official media.
"They don't want to let the general public know what is really going on," he said.
Activists say that China has an exemplary set of environmental protection legislation, but that environmental officials lack the power to impose it on powerful vested interests at the local level.
Reported by Fang Yuan for RFA's Mandarin service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.