3 held over anti-corruption payoff scam
Print Edition
Three people who built a fake interrogation center and pretended to be graft inspectors, kidnapping an official and his wife to extort money from them have been arrested in northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province.
Police are looking for a fourth suspect believed to be connected to the case.
According to media reports, four people forced their way into the home of agricultural official Zhang Wei in August.
They claimed they were from the prosecutors’ office and led away the official and his wife with hoods over their heads.
The couple was driven to a building in which there was a room set up to look like an interrogation room, including a government seal on the wall.
“Two of them started to question me and came up with several issues of breaking the law. I said the issues didn’t exist, and when after a few hours they’d not got any answers, they started to get nervous,” Zhang said.
After offering to pay the men 200,000 yuan (US$31,500), the two sides agreed on 400,000 yuan, and Zhang and his wife were released to get the money.
Once free, Zhang called the police who arrested three of the suspects. Officers later discovered the suspects spent 200,000 yuan to prepare the fake interrogation room.
Since China launched a crackdown on graft in 2012, there has been a series of cases of criminals posing as anti-corruption officials to get people to hand over their ill-gotten gains.
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