A Chinese official was allegedly drowned by investigators who stripped him naked and held him down in a bathtub as they attempted to extort a confession to corruption, state-run media reported yesterday.
Yu Qiyi was held down by graft investigators in a tub full of “icy water” several times after his questioning failed to produce satisfactory answers, the Beijing Times said, citing a court filing by prosecutors.
They only stopped when Yu, 42, the chief engineer of a state-owned company in the eastern city of Wenzhou, stopped struggling, the report said.
He was taken to hospital and died a few hours later.
A post-mortem showed he had been made to “imbibe liquids” that caused pulmonary dysfunction and eventually his death, according to a photograph of a forensic document carried by the newspaper.
Relatives also found multiple bruises on his body after his death in April, it added.
He had been detained since early March over suspected wrongdoing in a land deal, the report said.
The six investigators who interrogated Yu — five of them from the Chinese Communist Party’s discipline inspection department and the other one a local prosecutor — have been charged with intentional injury and a trial is pending, the report said.
“Yu Qiyi was a strong man before he was detained... but was skinny when he died,” the dead man’s wife, Wu Qian was quoted as saying by the newspaper. “He was bruised internally and externally during the 38 days [in detention]. He must have been tortured in other ways besides the drowning exposed by the prosecution.”
China’s new leadership has mounted a high-profile anti-corruption drive since Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) took over as party chief, warning that corruption could destroy the party and threatening to expose high-ranking officials, or “tigers,” along with low-level “flies.”
Some senior figures have been ensnared, among them Jiang Jiemin (蔣潔敏), who oversaw state-owned firms, and Liu Tienan (劉鐵男), once a deputy director of the influential National Development and Reform Commission.
Sudden deaths of officials while under investigation are not unknown in China.
Qian Guoliang, a seismological official in Huangmei County in the central province of Hubei, died in June after he was taken away by the party’s anti-graft investigators, previous media reports said. His face was out of shape, and his body carried bruises and festering sores when relatives saw him in hospital, they said.
A subsidiary of a Hong Kong-based company that has lost control of two critical ports on the Panama Canal said it is seeking US$2 billion of compensation in damages from Panama over its “illegal” takeover of the ports. Panama Ports Co, a unit of Hong Kong’s CK Hutchison Holdings (長江和記實業), on Friday said in a statement that it is demanding the sum under international arbitration proceedings that it had already started. The Panamanian government last week seized control of the Balboa and Cristobal ports on each end of the Panama Canal, after the country’s Supreme Court declared earlier that a concession allowing
DETERRENCE: With 1,000 indigenous Hsiung Feng II and III missiles and 400 Harpoon missiles, the nation would boast the highest anti-ship missile density in the world With Taiwan wrapping up mass production of Hsiung Feng II and III missiles by December and an influx of Harpoon missiles from the US, Taiwan would have the highest density of anti-ship missiles in the world, a source said yesterday. Taiwan is to wrap up mass production of the indigenous anti-ship missiles by the end of year, as the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology has been meeting production targets ahead of schedule, a defense official with knowledge of the matter said. Combined with the 400 Harpoon anti-ship missiles Taiwan expects to receive from the US by 2028, the nation would have
POSSIBILITIES EMERGE: With Taiwan’s victory and Japan’s narrow win over Australia, Taiwan now have a chance to advance if South Korea also beat the Aussies Taiwan has high hopes that the national baseball team would advance to the World Baseball Classic (WBC) quarter-finals after clinching a crucial 5-4 victory over South Korea in a nail-biting extra-inning game at the Tokyo Dome yesterday. Boosted by three home runs — two solo shots by Yu Chang (張育成) and Cheng Tsung-che (鄭宗哲) and a two-run homer by Stuart Fairchild — the triumph gave Taiwan a much-needed second victory in the five-team Pool C, where only the top two finishers would advance to the knockout stage in Miami, Florida. Entering extra innings with the game tied at four apiece, Taiwan scored
MISSION OF PEACE: The foreign minister urged Beijing to respect Taiwan’s existence as an independent nation, and work together to ensure peace and stability in the region Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) yesterday rejected Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi’s (王毅) comments about Taiwan, criticizing China as a “troublemaker” in the international community and a disruptor of cross-strait peace. Speaking at a news conference on the sidelines of the Chinese National People’s Congress, Wang said that Taiwan has always been a territory of China and that it would be impossible for it to become its own country. The “return” of Taiwan to China was the natural outcome of the Chinese people’s resistance against Japan in World War II, and that any pursuit of independence was “doomed
RSS