Grisly Murder Brings Back Haunting Memories
In March, the Chinese media reported that in December 2016 a court in Beijing handed a suspended death sentence to two migrant workers from a village in Sichuan province, while three others were given jail terms ranging from fifteen years to life imprisonment for the premeditated murder of a colleague in August 2014. They had killed him on a construction site in Shunyi district, Beijing, and then used his corpse to stage a fake accident in order to claim compensation from the construction company by posing as relatives of the victim. Such grisly deeds are not unheard of in China. In May 2016, prosecutors in Inner Mongolia announced the indictment of seventy-four people for the killing of seventeen mine workers in order to blackmail mine owners running unlicensed operations into paying reparations. In 2009, the police discovered that several residents of a village in Leibo county, Sichuan province, were involved in buying or kidnapping people with severe mental problems to sell them as slaves or to kill them in mines to get compensation by posing as relatives. A similar situation was famously portrayed few years earlier in Li Yang’s haunting movie Blind Shaft. IF
