Party chief held after employing thugs in fatal land grab
The party chief of a Jiangsu village has been detained after hiring more than 200 armed thugs to forcibly evict farmers from their land to make way for a petrochemical factory, state media reported yesterday.
At least one villager was killed and another seriously injured during the land grab on January 7, triggering a protest by 1,000 people after officials used police to take away the dead body and cover up the death.
Another 29 suspects, mostly thugs hired by party chief Sun Xiaojun, had also been arrested over the violent clashes, Xinhua reported.
Farmers from Hewan village in Pizhou complained they had often been forced to transfer their farmland to Sun for compensation well below the market rate, with the profits going into the pockets of developers and the local government.
They said Sun had illegally requisitioned more than 2,500 mu (167 hectares) of land since 2003. Some 100 villagers staged a sit-in protest on their land when Sun wanted to requisition 300 mu of the village's remaining 500 mu on January 7.
Farmer Li Dongdong , 22, was stabbed to death by thugs, while Li Weinan , 21, was stabbed in the chest and suffered serious lung injuries.
Villagers said they had reported the clash to police twice, but officers had only given a warning to the mob before leaving. The next day, 200 police were sent to take Li's body from a mortuary, saying the authorities wanted to conduct an autopsy.
Police allegedly opened the mortuary door by force and used tear gas to drive away Li's family after they rejected the autopsy.
A few hours afterwards, more than 1,000 angry villagers took to the streets, staging two days of protests to demand justice over the fatality and continued land requisitions.
The village has a history of trouble. In 2007 and 2008, villagers smashed factories and police vehicles during demonstrations over land requisitions, according to yesterday's Beijing Times.
Farmer Wang Shaoying , 72, whose family earned 3,000 yuan (HK$3,408) a year from their land, said they were forced to live on compensation of 1,000 yuan a year after they were evicted by the government in 2007.
'They can't take away our land, we need the land to earn a bare living,' she said.
Other villagers complained that Sun had sold their land to real estate developers for 170,000 yuan per mu but had given them just 30,000 yuan in one-off compensation.
Confiscations of homes and land by officials trigger a large number of deadly protests every year. In November, a Chengdu woman set herself on fire in such a protest and later died in hospital.
