Chinese investigators given jail terms for torture of party official
Six officials sentenced to between four and 14 years in jail for torturing another official to death
Six Chinese Communist Party officials have been sentenced to between four and 14 years in jail for torturing another official to death, lawyers and his ex-wife said on Monday, in a case that shed light on the workings of the party’s judicial system.
The sentences marked a rare instance of legal punishment handed down over the abuse of a party official detained under the organisation’s secretive extra-legal detention process, lawyers for the family of the dead man said.
A court in the eastern city of Quzhou issued the verdicts on September 30, a decision not reported by Chinese media. The trial had opened on September 17.
In reality, they want to control the scope of people who can be targeted for this
The six officials were convicted of intentional infliction of harm leading to death over the drowning in April of Yu Qiyi, 42, a chief engineer for a state-owned investment firm in the nearby city of Wenzhou. Yu had been dunked repeatedly in a bucket of ice-cold water.
It is not precisely clear why Yu was being investigated, although it was possibly related to a land deal, according to his family’s lawyers.
Yu had spent 38 days under “shuanggui”, a form of detention imposed on party officials being investigated for disciplinary violations.
Five officials from the party’s corruption watchdog, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, were given sentences of four to 14 years, according to a lawyer for one of the accused and lawyers representing Yu’s family. The five were Zhang Fangchao, Li Xiang, Cheng Wenjie, Wu Zhiwei and Nan Yu.