Schoolchild murders haunt boom city
- Source: Global Times
- [22:30 January 11 2010]
- Comments
Parents in the affluent city of Nanjing await their "little emperors" coming out of school. Many working parents have little time to pick up their children, creating safety issues.
By Wang Weilan in Shenzhen
Eleven-year-old Li Wenxuan was sitting in the same peculiar, twisted posture even when his body was found, his mother Zhong Yuping weeping told the court.
The first child murder case in Shenzhen of the new year was recounted in grisly detail at the Guangdong Province city's intermediate court on January 7.
At least five schoolboys were kidnapped in Shenzhen last year, three of them killed, according to the police. The true number of kidnappings remains the subject of considerable controversy and contention in this original southern Chinese boom city of 12 million on the border with Hong Kong.
Li suffocated to death in a suitcase. His body was thrown in a gutter near the exit of the Guangzhou-Shenzhen Changhu Expressway on April 4, eight hours after he was kidnapped.
Wang Peng, 26, and Luo Wenjie pleaded guilty to kidnapping and killing Li. Another suspect – Zheng Tao – is still at large. The judge announced no verdict. If any verdict was passed, it has not been reported and the Global Times was unable to discover any verdicts or sentences in most of the famous kidnapping cases mentioned in this story.
A court statement identified Wang, a nephew of Li's aunt, as a key plotter. Li's family and his aunt lived in the same building, with Li on the third floor. Li routinely ate supper in his aunt's home on the fourth floor.
On the evening of April 3 last year, Wang invited Li's father downstairs to play cards with Li's uncle and left Li playing computer games upstairs. Wang unlocked the downstairs security door for Luo and Zheng at 9:20 pm. They snatched Li, stuffed him in a suitcase on the back seat of their car and drove towards Humen, a county city within the prefecture-level city of Dongguan.
