Lucas de la Cal Shanghai

Shanghai

Updated Wednesday, January 31, 2024-09:58

Zhang Bo threw his two children out of a 15th-floor window because his partner, Ye Chengchen, threatened to break up the relationship if he did not get rid of the children, a 2-year-old girl and a 1-year-old boy. It happened in November 2020. Seven months later, the couple was sentenced to death. This Wednesday,

Zhang and Ye were executed in Chongqing, southwest China.

It has been one of the events that has most shocked Chinese public opinion in recent years. "A man kills his two young children in order to form a new family with his current partner," read the headlines in the Chinese media when the news broke.

Zhang Bo had begun a relationship with Ye Chengchen

in 2019 while he was still married

to his wife, Chen Meilin, whom he divorced in February 2020. It was then that Zhang and Ye began planning the murder of the man's two children.

"Ye pressured her to commit the crime.

She did not want her future husband to have children with another woman

," said the first ruling of the Chongqing People's Court, later ratified by the Supreme Court.

"When the children are gone, I will marry you.

Why don't you kill them both now?

" Ye au boyfriend wrote in a message, according to conversations presented during the trial by Zhang's ex-wife. The father threw the little ones out of the window of his apartment while he was alone with them.

The child died instantly. The girl, in the hospital.

Zhang Bo's children.

Neighbors said they saw the father running down the stairs and crying towards the bodies of his children.

Everyone thought it was an accident.

Zhang, in his first version, stated that he was sleeping when the children fell out of the window.

Later, he himself confessed to the police that he had planned the crime together with Ye, who had threatened to cut his wrists if he did not kill his children. "When Zhang hesitated, Ye forced him to commit the crime and finally carried out the murder," the court verdict said.

This Wednesday, Zhang and Ye

were not the only murderers executed in China.

In Fuzhou, in the south,

Wu Xieyu has also undergone lethal injection

. This 30-year-old man murdered her mother in 2015 by hitting her with dumbbells.

"Wu's father died of cancer in 2010. The young man began to have a very pessimistic attitude towards life and suicidal behavior. He thought that the life of his mother, Xie Tianqin, also had no meaning. One day, he picked up some bars and beat her to death," says a note about the event published by the

China Daily

newspaper . At trial, Wu claimed that he committed the crime

to "relieve her mother from the pain of losing her husband."

China, which maintains the death penalty for 46 crimes beyond murder, such as drug trafficking and corruption, executes more people a year than the rest of the world combined. But the exact figure is never published. It is considered a state secret.

To know more

International.

China confirms the death penalty for an American for murdering his girlfriend

  • Editorial: AFP

China confirms the death penalty for an American for murdering his girlfriend

Asia.

The former principal of a primary school is executed in China for raping and abusing more than twenty minors

  • Editorial: EFE

The former principal of a primary school is executed in China for raping and abusing more than twenty minors

In the Asian giant, when the capital punishment is handed down by provincial courts,

the Supreme Court must always review the case before giving the go-ahead

and setting a date for the lethal injection or execution.

Last year, Wang Yun was executed for

poisoning the breakfast porridge of 25 children with sodium nitrite.

It happened in 2019. One of the children died from multiple organ failure. The murderer worked at a daycare center in central China. In spring 2023,

another high school teacher, Lu Yin, was also executed for killing three students with a knife.

Before that, at home, she had slit the throats of her husband and her mother-in-law.

Three rapists were executed in May after the Supreme Court approved their death sentences.

Ni Duqun had raped seven girls under the age of 14 several times

, leaving two of them pregnant. Wang Xiaoshan raped five minors in hotels. The third executed, Sun Baochang, also recorded the rapes and threatened the girls with making the content public if they resisted having sexual relations with him.

A month earlier it was the turn of a South Korean drug trafficker.

A father who had thrown his two-year-old son out of the window of his house

during the pandemic confinements, a woman who kidnapped five children in the south of the country and a businessman convicted of corruption were

also not saved from lethal injection.

.