BEIJING - Police have freed 32 mentally handicapped people forced to work "like slaves" in brick kilns in eastern China and arrested 10 people suspected of holding them, state press said.

Up to 80 policemen raided the two kilns in Anhui province on April 28, arresting a kiln boss identified as Zhang and nine others suspected of holding the workers, Xinhua news agency said.

"All of them are mentally handicapped people aged between 25 and 45. Few of them can tell where they were from," Xinhua quoted Gao Jie, a local police official, as saying.

The 10 are "suspected of beating and treating the mentally-handicapped people like slaves," it said.

So far police have located the families of 12 of the workers and returned them, while the others are living in a welfare shelter, it said.

Zhang allegedly "bought" the workers for up to 300 yuan (44 dollars) each from a taxi driver who recruited them with the promise of work, pay, food and lodging, it said.

But after being brought to the kilns, the workers were forced to work for no pay, it said.

The discovery comes after a 2007 slavery scandal in neighbouring Henan province and Shanxi province in the north where thousands of people were forced to work in kilns and subjected to regular beatings and near-starvation diets.

Although no official numbers have been revealed on how many were enslaved in the 2007 scandal, a parliamentary investigation said some 53,000 migrant workers were employed in over 2,000 illegal brick kilns in Shanxi alone.