A secret group is behind a number of shocking animal abuse videos that have recently been circulating online in China, according to an Internet post by someone claiming to be an insider.

The message, posted on tianya.com, said an organized group in China hires girls to abuse small animals and then sells the videos abroad.

The girls would receive at least 6,000 yuan($903) each time to shoot the videos, the post said. The poster claimed to be an insider who had been in the group for half a year.

The claim follows a particularly brutal four-minute video that appeared nine days ago on mop.com, in which a girl placed a thick piece of glass on top of a rabbit and sat on it, crushing the animal to death. On the ground were two other dead rabbits.

The video drew over 500,000 hits that day and enraged netizens, who quickly began a human flesh search and discovered where the girl lived, her surname, her MSN account and QQ number, the Chongqing Business Daily reported.

Under huge pressure, the girl apologized on her QQ space Saturday, saying she regretted what she had done. In another post written the next day, she said that the decision to kill the rabbit had been her own.

However, the insider claimed that her actions had been organized by a group named Crushfetish, and previous videos on the Internet showing a middle-aged woman abusing a cat, a dog and a rabbit had also been produced by the group.

The insider said that the members of this group contacted each other through QQ and had their own website, which contained several pictures and videos of animal abuse. The insider claimed the website was only open for a few hours each night, and offered girls money to appear in the videos.

"There is still no law in China to protect ordinary animals and we can only condemn those sadists on a moral level," Duan Qin, a lawyer at the Chongqing Lida Law Office said, adding that the frequency of animal abuse incidents had made more people realize the urgency in drawing up relevant laws.