Death sentence for serial killer who confessed
Print Edition
A KILLER whose confession cleared the name of a teenager wrongly executed for murder in 1996 was sentenced to death yesterday.
Zhao Zhihong, 42, was convicted of murder, rape and robbery at the Hohhot Intermediate People’s Court in north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Xinhua news agency reported.
Zhao was arrested in 2005 and confessed to a string of rape and murder cases, including the 1996 rape and choking to death of a woman in the toilet of a Hohhot textile factory.
It was a crime for which factory worker Huugjilt had been tried, convicted, sentenced and executed in just 61 days since the woman was killed. He was 18 years old.
Doubts were cast on the verdict when Zhao was arrested in 2005 and confessed to murders that included the one blamed on Huugjilt.
The murder was not among nine for which Zhao was tried in 2006 but his insistence that he had killed 10 females led to the regional higher court suspending proceedings.
In November last year, the court reviewed the 1996 case and in December declared Huugjilt innocent, clearing the way for Zhao’s trial to resume.
Yesterday, he was sentenced to death after being found guilty of 21 cases of murder, rape and robbery.
He was also fined 53,000 yuan (US$8,485) and ordered to pay 102,768 yuan compensation to victims, Xinhua reported.
Between April 1996 and July 2005, Zhao raped 13 females, including underage girls, killing 10 of them, the court said.
He was also convicted of using violence or threats to appropriate property worth 31,400 yuan, and stealing a further 3,500 yuan in several burglary cases.
The court said Zhao’s motives were despicable, his measures cruel and the consequences serious, thus it refused to give a lenient punishment despite the fact he had confessed to some of the crimes.
Zhao told the court he needed time to consider whether to appeal the sentence, according to Xinhua.
In an interview with The Beijing News, Zhao’s lawyers, Zhang Ruijun and Xie Fei, said Zhao wanted his life to be spared as he hoped to return to society to make a “fresh start.”
Zhao’s parents weren’t in court and media reports said his family had never visited him since his arrest.
“We hate him. He is a bad guy,” his mother Liu Ainu told the Legal Evening News, adding that the family would forget his existence by imagining that he had been “blown away by the wind.”
On hearing the verdict, Huugjilt’s mother Shang Aiyun burst into tears and his father Li Sanren said the family finally could live a normal life.
“It has been such suffering for us in all these years.” Li said. “Zhao’s conviction means my son is really innocent.”
He added that the family were keeping an eye on an official investigation into suspected disciplinary and law violations surrounding their son’s case.
Prosecutors have taken several people in for questioning, including Feng Zhiming, the police officer in charge of the 1996 investigation who won promotion for its swift “resolution.”
Huugjilt’s family have received 2.05 million yuan in compensation from the state. His parents said their first task would be to find a proper burial site for their son.
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