'Murder victim' still alive

2005-06-15 21:08

Beijing - A woman thought to have been murdered in the 1980s has re-appeared in China, 16 years after a man convicted of killing her was executed, said reports on Wednesday.

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 was convicted of the April 1987 murder of a woman believed to be Shi Xiaorong in Mayang county in the central province of Hunan.

The Yangcheng Evening News reported that Xingshan was executed in January 1989, despite pleas of innocence and accusations that a confession was beaten out of him.

Judiciary urged to rectify case

But, the corpse was misidentified. The paper said, his alleged victim, Shi, who once worked in Mayang county, had re-appeared in her hometown in Songtao county in neighbouring Guizhou province.

Shi had claimed that she never met Teng and urged the Hunan judiciary to rectify the case and declared 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 for the case.

The report said they formally brought a lawsuit before the Hunan High Court, earlier this month.

Govt sued for compensation

The case came after a man who served 11 years in prison for the murder of his wife was officially declared innocent in April, two weeks after the victim re-appeared in her village in the central province of Hubei.

Xianglin was now suing the government for compensation for his mistrial and for being brutally beaten during interrogation.

A police officer involved in the investigation committed suicide late last month.

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.

Although torture was outlawed in China, human rights groups said it was frequently used in police investigations.

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 this year another suspect confessed to the crime.

Judicial authorities admitted their mistake.

- AFP