Police have arrested a man suspected of killing at least 25 high school students in central China over a two-year period, after luring them from Internet cafes and electronic gaming halls to his home in central Henan province, officials and Internet Web sites said yesterday.
Police in Pingyu County arrested the suspected killer Huang Yong, 29, on Nov. 12 after a 16-year-old boy who he had kidnapped escaped his home in Dahuangzhuang village, the official Henan News Net said on its Web site.
The boy reported his Nov. 7 kidnapping to police who arrested Huang, the report said.
After police found 18 bodies buried behind Huang's house, the suspected killer confessed to strangling 25 victims, it said.
Police in Pingyu County and in Dahuangzhuang village refused to confirm Huang's arrest or comment on the case, but a local official in Yuhuangmiao Township confirmed that Huang had been arrested and was being charged with murder.
Huang's arrest comes after police in neighboring Hebei Province arrested Wang Ganggang on Nov 2, as the leading suspect in what could be China's largest-ever serial murder case.
Wang, also a native of Henan Province, is suspected to have killed at least 65 people in Henan and neighboring, Hebei, Shandong and Anhui provinces, Xinhua news agency reported Friday on its Web site.
Central authorities appear to have placed a gag order on both murder cases, as information has only appeared on Web sites and not in Chinese dailies.
Refusals by officials and police to discuss the cases also appear to reflect official reluctance to comment on such extreme crimes until after they have solved them.
The parents of 13 missing boys had already set up a self-help group seeking the whereabouts of their missing children and had urged police to better patrol Internet cafes and gaming halls in the region.
Huang allegedly lured the boys to his home with offers of employment, then tied them up and strangled them with a rope, the report said.
The 16-year old boy, identified as Zhang Liang, was allegedly tortured by Huang, who choked the boy three times until he passed out, but did not kill him.
Mass murders have become increasingly common in China, due to what observers believe is a result of the country's rapidly changing socio-economic fabric which has seen a widening gap between the rich and poor, increased psychological stress on people and increasing mobility.
On Friday police said a Chinese man had confessed to raping at least 37 elderly women, some of them in their 90s, because he said they were "easy to control."
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the