Official suspended for his not-so-secret affair

A HEALTH bureau official in Liyang City, Jiangsu Province, has been suspended from his post and is under investigation for flirting with a married woman via his microblog, the city's publicity department said yesterday.

The official, known as Weileni5123 on Weibo.com, the Chinese versio of Twitter, and the unidentified woman didn't realize that their erotic tweets were visible to all online users, thinking that the platform was a private chatting tool, yesterday's Modern Express newspaper reported.

Weileni5123, turned out to be Xia Zhiqiang, director of the bureau. He first tweeted on April 7, saying: "You can leave messages here. I promise I will reply every day."

As the tweets grew more heated, he proposed a sexual liaison with the woman, who was married and had a son. He told her "a relationship without physical contact is not perfect" and said he was looking forward to their "sacred moment."

"How can you see my microblog? That's impossible!" Xia told the newspaper.

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