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December 3, 2016

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Police: Mystery desert skeleton may be man missing since ‘60s

INITIAL investigations may have identified a skeleton recently discovered in a desert in northwest China’s Qinghai Province.

Addresses and names in three letters found near the remains helped police in Sichuan Province establish that the skeleton could be that of Li Zhonghua, a man from Bazhong City in the province, who went missing in the 1960s in Ruoqiang County in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, which borders Qinghai.

Police in Mangya, Qinghai, said on Thursday that their colleagues in Bazhong found the clue in less than 24 hours after their request for assistance. Li’s wife, 88, his two daughters and his brother still live in Bazhong.

Li’s brother told police that Li worked on the railway in Guizhou Province in the 1950s, and then in a brickyard. He found a farming job in Ruoqiang County where he lost contact with his family, more than 50 years ago.

“We wrote letters to the farm in Ruoqiang asking his whereabouts, but the farm had gone bankrupt, and they could not reach him either,” said Li’s brother.

Tang Tuohua, deputy head of Mangya police, said more tests were needed to conclusively identify the remains. Mangya police found the body in the Dalangtan Desert last week, after three tourists spotted a “mysterious skeleton” while picking stones there on November 15.

Forensic experts initially speculated it could be the body of a geologist who disappeared in the 1960s.

Mangya is in the northwestern part of Qinghai’s arid Qaidam Basin, with thin air, bitter cold and very little vegetation.

“We found the remains near a route to the famous Lop Nur in Xinjiang, surrounded by swathes of desert,” said Tang.

Police say the skeleton belongs to a male about 30 years old, and about 1.75 meters tall. The man was wearing a navy blue shirt and trousers, and a pair of yellow leather shoes. He also had a light yellow canvas bag, in which police found three letters, a flashlight, a pair of goggles and a piece of newspaper.

Lonely, desolate area

“The clothes on the front had been damaged, but the back was intact,” Tang said. “Judging from the postmarks on the letters, the date of the newspaper and the features of his clothes, we concluded that the time of the man’s death could be somewhere 1960 or 1961.

“At that time, few people entered this area, and those who did often died from the bitter cold and starvation,” said Tang. “The victim could have been lost.”

The discovery of the skeleton immediately awakened many people’s memories of Peng Jiamu, a famed Chinese scientist who disappeared in Lop Nur Desert without a trace on June 17, 1980.

Peng went missing during a scientific expedition to the Lop Nur, a former nuclear testing site.

Li Zhonghua’s daughter Li Juran, 67, told Chengdu Economic Daily she could not believe her father’s body had been found.

“We never thought he had died,” Li said. “We just thought that maybe he did not want to return home.” Wiping tears from her cheek, Li’s other daughter said:

“It has been so many years, and we finally have word about him. We have a big family now, but it is not ‘home sweet home’ without him.”




 

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