Beijing: Police have caught a man accused of starving and beating workers to keep them enslaved at brick kilns, state media reported, in a case that has shocked China and exposed links between Communist Party officials and the kiln owners.

Xinhua News Agency also said on Sunday that 'another 20 slave laborers at brick kilns and other illegal workplaces in north China's Shanxi province' had been freed, bringing to 568 the total of workers freed in Shanxi and neighboring Henan province. It said Heng Tinghan, accused of using slave workers since March, was captured in central China's Hubei province on Saturday night after a nationwide hunt.

Heng, 42, had become the suspected chief villain in the scandal after state media said a worker died at the kiln he ran, and ran pictures of workers with their skin rubbed raw or severely burned. More than 20,000 police were deployed in Shanxi alone to raid suspected illegal workplaces, with 168 people detained for running illegal kilns and mines there and in Henan.

The use of slave workers came under the spotlight in part because of an open letter posted online signed by a group of 400 fathers appealing for help in tracking missing sons they believed were sold to kiln bosses. The fathers accused Henan and Shanxi authorities of ignoring them or even protecting the kilns and human traffickers, saying about 1,000 children were being forced to work at kilns under conditions of extreme cruelty.

Xinhua said Wang Dongji, a Communist Party branch secretary at a village in Shanxi, was being investigated after his son was found to be an owner of a kiln were 32 people were starved, beaten and forced to work 14 hours or more a day.

Media reports have said workers as young as 8 were recruited from bus and train stations with false promises, or were abducted off the street, then sold to kilns for 500 yuan ($65) each. The slave scandal had forced action from the highest levels in China, with President Hu Jintao and other national leaders ordering an investigation.