Relatives of a man shot dead by the police in China said he was murdered after resisting a beating from officers, a lawyer said yesterday after a media uproar over his death.
Xu Chunhe (徐春和), 54, was killed in the northern city of Qingan earlier this month, highlighting more widespread arming of Chinese police officers in the wake of several train station attacks.
The Police prevented Xu — who had been in a long term dispute with local officials over benefit payments — from boarding a train before beating him with batons and shooting him, family lawyer Xie Yanyi said.
“The mistake was completely on the police’s side... it is a suspected case of intentional homicide,” Xie said, adding: “We have a responsibility to pursue criminal prosecution.”
Xu had previously attempted to seek higher-level intervention in his dispute, he added.
‘INTERCEPTORS’
Local officials in China often employ staff known as “interceptors” to forcibly prevent people from traveling to lodge complaints with more senior authorities.
The practice — often carried out without any legal basis — has come in for increasing criticism and several Chinese media outlets speculated that the police had used excessive force against Xu.
EXCESSIVE FORCE
According to Xinhua news agency, authorities said the dead man had assaulted police officers, trying to grab an officer’s gun and truncheon, and that he posed an obvious threat to public security.
However, in an unusually outspoken commentary, Xinhua called on local authorities to release video footage of Xu’s death.
Xie said that the police had detained Xu in the train station waiting room, tying him to a railing before beating him. Xu was shot after “resisting,” he cited witnesses as saying.
The police sent Xu’s mother to a nursing home following the shooting as a “kind of soft arrest to prevent her from contacting the outside world,” Xie added.
The provincial railway police in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang, declined to comment.
Regular police officers in major Chinese cities began patrolling with guns for the first time last year in response to a deadly mass knifing blamed on separatists from the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS