4 arrested for tycoon’s gruesome abduction
Print Edition
FOUR alleged kidnappers have been arrested for the abduction of a wealthy businessman who claimed that the men forced him to kill an unidentified massage parlour worker, police in Yibin City in southwest China’s Sichuan Province said yesterday.
The four suspects demanded a ransom from Zhang Yingqi, executive of the Yibin Yili Group and reportedly one of the richest men in Yibin, and forced him to strangle a woman to make sure that he wouldn’t report the kidnapping to police, Zhang told officers.
Zhang, 53, told police that four men attacked him with pepper spray while he was riding an elevator in a residential apartment building on November 10, tied his hands and feet and gagged and blindfolded him before taking him to a room in Zhaochang Town, the Legal Evening News reported yesterday.
Zhang said that the four men, who police identified by their surnames, Liu, Yue, Chen and Feng, then threatened him with a homemade gun and demanded a ransom of 100 million yuan (US$15.6 million) for his release.
Before Zhang was allowed to leave to fetch the ransom, he was forced to strangle a woman who appeared to have been abducted from a massage parlour, he told police. The crime, he said, was videotaped.
Just hours after he was kidnapped, Zhang was released and, instead of returning with ransom, went straight to the police to report the kidnap and murder. Based on Zhang’s accounts, police were able to arrest the four suspects last Wednesday.
Liu, a failed businessman who is suspected of being the mastermind behind the kidnap, was having financial problems, Legal Evening News reported yesterday.
Zhang has returned to work, the newspaper said.
Under the national Criminal Law, people who are forced to commit a crime can be subjected to a more lenient sentence or even be exempt from punishment.
In the 2007 murder of a prostitute in southwest China’s Yunnan Province, two women who were forced to join in the killing by a mafia-like group were exempt from criminal charges.
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