A Chinese court yesterday sentenced a convicted serial killer to death for a murder he confessed to a decade ago, and 19 years after a teenager was executed for the crime.
Zhao Zhihong (趙志紅), 42, was convicted of murder, rape and robbery by the Hohhot Intermediate People’s Court in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Xinhua news agency reported.
Zhao was arrested in 2005 and confessed to a string of rape and murder cases, including the 1996 rape and strangulation of a woman in the bathroom of a Hohhot textile factory.
An 18-year-old named Hugjiltu had already been tried, convicted, sentenced and executed, being put to death 61 days after the woman was killed. However, the killing was not among nine for which Zhao was tried in 2006.
Hugjiltu’s family tried for years to prove the teenager’s innocence; he was finally exonerated in December last year, clearing the way for Zhao to face trial.
The case has highlighted the shortcomings in the nation’s Chinese Communist Party-controlled legal system, where acquittals are extremely rare — 99.93 percent of defendants in criminal cases were found guilty in 2013, according to official Chinese statistics.
The use of force to extract confessions remains widespread in the nation and defendants often do not have effective legal defense in criminal trials, leading to regular miscarriages of justice.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
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Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia