Police yesterday named a deaf murderer as the chief suspect behind four huge explosions in the northern Chinese city of Shijiazhuang which hospital sources said killed at least 110 people.
A police spokesman in the city said 41-year-old Jin Ruchao, on the run for the murder of his girlfriend, was being sought in connection with Friday's dawn explosions around a complex of cotton factories.
However some workers at the state-owned factories targeted by the blasts said that they believed disgruntled workers carried out the coordinated attacks because of fears over mass lay-offs.
"Jin Ruchao is the main suspect," said the police spokesman, declining to give his name.
The Legal Daily and the China Police Daily carried black and white photos yesterday of Jin along with details of an arrest warrant and a 50,000 yuan (US$6,000) reward.
Jin is wanted for the March 9 killing of his girlfriend Wei Zhihua in Maguan county, in the southern province of Yunan, said the warrant.
The suspected bomber had two rooms in the 15th and 16th dormitories of Shijiazhuang Number Three Cotton Factory's residential area where one of the major blasts occurred, said the papers.
Sun Wanglin, a police official in Manguan County near the Vietnamese border, said that Jin killed his lover after she refused to return home with him to Shijiazhuang, at the other end of the country.
A toll compiled by AFP after contacting nine hospitals in Shijiazhuang on Saturday showed 110 people dead. However the city's Number Three Hospital, where most of the victims are believed to have been taken, refused to comment.
The official Xinhua news agency has given a death toll of 18 which has not been updated for more than 24 hours. Residents in the city have put the death toll as high as 200.
The explosions occurred Friday morning between 4:16am and 5:21am in the provincial capital of Hebei Province, the semi-official China News Service reported.
Chinese state television showed images of scores of police and firefighters sifting through a huge pile of rubble which was a five storey residential building attached to the city's Number Three Cotton Mill.
A second blast cut a swathe through a four-story residence attached to the Number One Cotton Factory which residents said held 24 families.
An official at the Number Three Cotton Factory said it was believed around 200 people died and that many people believed several workers must have been involved in a plot to blow up the buildings.
The Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said the chief suspect Jin had been fired from the Number Three Cotton Factory in 1983 for "hooliganism." It said his father survived the blast and had been detained along with other family members.
The center's director Frank Lu said he believed Jin was being made into a scapegoat and that there was no evidence to show he knew how to handle explosives.
The blasts came after Prime Minister Zhu Rongji earlier this week apologized to the nation for an explosion at a school in Jiangxi Province on March 6 which left around 50 people dead, mostly young children.
China has blamed the school blast on a suicidal madman, although parents allege the children were making fireworks in the classroom at the time of the explosion.
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