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BEIJING - A hearing began Friday in the first civil suit to be heard in court involving parents suing a dairy company and supermarket over selling tainted milk, The China Daily, an official English-language newspaper, reported Saturday.

Ma Xuexin, who says his 20-month-old son got a kidney stone from drinking tainted milk, filed a lawsuit seeking the equivalent of $8,080 in compensation from the dairy company, the Sanlu Group, and Longhua, a supermarket chain based in Beijing. Ma, from Henan province, said he had bought the contaminated milk from a local Longhua store.

Sanlu and Longhua both said they should not have to pay compensation to Ma because his son should be covered under a fund set up by the government for victims of the tainted milk, The China Daily reported.

Sanlu, based in northeastern Hebei province, paid $132 million into the $161 million fund and declared bankruptcy. A lawyer for Sanlu also argued that there were no medical records linking the boy's kidney problems to drinking tainted milk.

Several civil suits have been filed over the tainted milk scandal, which ignited outrage throughout the country in the fall of 2008. Criminal trials were held late last year.

The scandal erupted in September 2008, right after the Beijing Olympics, when parents discovered that children had been falling ill from drinking dairy products tainted with melamine, an industrial chemical.

At least six children died and 300,000 were sickened by drinking tainted products, according to government statistics. The melamine had been added by middlemen to make the dairy products falsely appear to meet nutritional standards.


Nearly two dozen dairy companies were found to have tainted products, but the level of melamine in Sanlu products was by far the highest.

The central government and local officials have tried to stifle parents who are questioning whether corruption was involved and who are demanding compensation. On Nov. 13, police officers in Beijing detained Zhao Lianhai, a father who has been organizing angry parents.

Criminal cases involving a Sanlu executive and middlemen dealers were brought to court. Last week, two men convicted of producing and selling toxic milk were executed. The men were sentenced to death last January, and Sanlu's chairwoman, Tian Wenhua, received a life sentence at that time.

The hearing on Friday adjourned without a verdict. The judge, Zhang Nan, asked both sides to bring more evidence to the next session, to be held Dec. 9.