Chinese media revealed on Monday that a local court in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region has interfered in a case 18 years ago, obstructing a retrial that is likely to open in near future.

An ethnically Mongolian Chinese man Qoysiletu was convicted in 1996 for raping and murdering a young woman in Hohhot.

He was 18 at the time. But 10 years later, another man, Zhao Zhihong, who was arrested by police for a string of murders, confessed he was the guilty party.

 Qoysiletu was arrested in 1996 after reporting to police in Hohhot that he had found a young woman's dead body in a public toilet after mistakenly entering a women's restroom while drunk, Beijing-based The Mirror reported.

Local police quickly found him responsible for the crime and charged him with the young woman's rape and murder, and carried out his death penalty two months later.

The police only realized Qoysiletu was wronged 10 years later in 2006 when Zhao Zhihong, a serial killer and rapist confessed to being the real murderer.

 Qoysiletu's parents have appealed the case to the High Court of Inner Mongolia for the past nine years, and registered a Weibo account on October 31 to raise the public's awareness around the case.

Tang Ji, a Xinhua News Agency reporter and the first journalist to report on a possible wrongful conviction, was quoted in the most recent report as saying that Qoysiletu' case was originally set to be reviewed after the emergence of the "real murderer".

"[But a source] told me that the reason why the case could not be properly handled according to legal procedures is because a regional court in the autonomous region did not execute orders to retry the case from the central government, the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate," Tang was quoted by the New Cultural newspaper, a daily newspaper in Jilin Province.

Tang hinted during the interview that the prolonged delay in a retrial may be because of the Inner Mongolian court's reluctance to compensate Qoysiletu's family for the wrongful conviction.

The report did not specify the identity of Tang's source.

In a new twist for an old case, Beijing-based newspaper The Mirror reported on October 30 that a retrial for the case may be on the horizon, quoting sources from Inner Mongolia's Commission for Political and Legal Affairs, Public Security Bureau and High Court.

But authorities have not made any public statement yet.