Guangdong police have detained a young man and
a woman suspected of dismembering a man and sending his body parts
to three different cities by post.
The man is an employee of a local logistics company, while the
woman is a prostitute, according to the Guangzhou-based
Southern Metropolis News.
A grab from a
closed-circuit television camera shows a man sending the three
boxes containing the parts of a man that he and his accomplice
allegedly murdered in Guangzhou recently.
"The case is thought to involve a murder for love," the
newspaper quoted a police source as saying yesterday.
The victim was a 50-year-old man who had once visited the
prostitute, the newspaper said. The young man is believed to have
fallen in love with the prostitute. The two then allegedly
conspired to kill the older man because he had met with the
prostitute.
After dismembering the man's body, the two allegedly put the
parts into three cardboard boxes, which they then sent to three
different cities.
The murder came to light on January 7 after staff at a logistics
company in Qingdao, east China's Shandong Province, noticed blood seeping out
of one of the boxes. The box was meant to be carrying medicine.
Qingdao police opened the box, which was 60-70 centimeters long
and 30-40 centimeters wide, and found a human torso but no head,
arms or legs. The box had been sent from Guangzhou.
Meanwhile, police in Beijing and Jiangyin, in east China's Jiangsu Province, found a man's head and arms
on January 9. Police said they believed the parts belonged to the
same man.
Qingdao immediately sent five police officers, led by a deputy
bureau chief, to Guangzhou to help investigate the case. Guangzhou
police set up a special task force to handle the case after
learning that body parts had turned up in other cities.
Footage taken by closed-circuit television at a Guangzhou
shipping company showed that a man and a woman had sent the
packages.
The footage showed that the two had arrived by taxi at a cargo
transport terminal on Guangzhou's Shatai Road at about 6:30 PM on
January 4 to ship three boxes by truck. The boxes had been labeled
as medicine and machine fittings.
The man signed for the packages using the apparent pseudonym
Song Deyuan, which translates as "sent far away".
The logistics company did not inspect the boxes before sending
them on to their destinations, the paper reported. Officials from
the company refused to comment on the case yesterday.
(China Daily January 15, 2007)
