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CHINA. ANOTHER “MURDER VICTIM” REAPPEARS AFTER KILLER EXECUTED
June 15, 2005: it was reported by the Yangcheng Evening News that a woman thought to have been murdered in the 1980s reappeared in China, 16 years after the man convicted of killing had been executed.
It was the second case in two months in which a "murder victim" had been found alive after police and judicial officials allegedly used torture and forced confessions to convict the suspected murderers.
Teng Xingshan had been convicted of the April 1987 murder of a woman believed to be Shi Xiaorong in Mayang county in the central province of Hunan. He was executed in January 1989, despite pleas of innocence and accusations that a confession was beaten out of him. But the corpse was misidentified. His alleged victim, Shi, who once worked in Mayang county, reappeared in her home town in Songtao county in neighboring Guizhou province. Shi claimed that she never met Teng and urged the Hunan judiciary to rectify the case and declare his trial a miscarriage of justice. Teng's family had heard that Shi was alive in Guizhou as early as 1993 but it took them years to verify that she was alive and they did not have the funds to sue the judiciary over the case.
The case came after a man who served 11 years in prison for the murder of his wife was officialy declared innocent in April, two weeks after the victim reappeared in her village in the central province of Hubei. She Xianglin was suing the government for compensation over his mistrial and for being brutally beaten during interrogation. She's wife had run away from home and remarried in a remote village in eastern Shandong province, unaware of the fate of her former husband.
In a similar case in 1994, Nie Shubin, a young farmer in north China, was executed for the rape and murder of a local woman but earlier in 2005 another suspect confessed to the crime. (Sources: Agence France Presse, 15/06/2005)
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