Chinese court clears man jailed 15 years over spate of attacks on women in Xinjiang
Zhou Yuan, 47, was initially sentenced to death for the crimes
Xinjiang’s top court has exonerated a man who was wrongfully convicted of a series of sexual assaults and attacks on women dating back to the early 1990s, for which he spent 15 years in jail after he was initially sentenced to death.
Zhou Yuan, 47, was on Thursday cleared of two counts of coercive indecent assault by the Higher People’s Court of Xinjiang, which said the facts of the case were unclear and the evidence insufficient, news outlet Thepaper.cn reported.
The case has been met with outrage in China, with comparisons made on social media to Nie Shubin, a 20-year-old farmer who was executed by firing squad over the rape and murder of a woman in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province in 1995. His conviction was overturned by the supreme court last year, a decade after another man confessed to the crime.
It was Zhou’s second retrial after he was initially given the death penalty, followed by a life sentence, then had his jail term reduced to 15 years, the report said.
