Left-behind boy, 13, admits to murdering three children in his home village in southwest China
Killings took place in impoverished Guangxi region, raising attention again to the welfare of children raised in the absence of their migrant worker parents
A 13-year-old teenager in a southwest China has admitted to killing three children in his home village when he tried to steal money from their family, The Beijing News reports.
One the night of July 18, the boy went to the children’s home in Shi Qiao village, in an impoverished part of the Guangxi autonomous region, while the parents were not in the house.
The boy later told police that he tricked the children – two girls aged 4 and 8, a boy aged 7 – into following him away from the home, and then began to threaten them to tell him where their parents had kept their money, the report said.
Before long, the children started crying. The boy panicked, then bashed and stabbed the children to death before dumping their bodies in a well.
The boy then fled by foot and on stolen bicycles to neighbouring Guangdong province, where he was arrested on July 25 after passers-by reported him to police.
According to the report, the boy is the second child in his family and had been abandoned by his mother. He started running away from home at the age of five, dropped out of school after Grade 6, and went to work in a factory in Guangdong. In May this year, he returned to the village after getting tired of the factory life.
China’s industrialisation since the early 1980s has meant that many children have been left with relatives as their parents sought better paying factory jobs in the larger cities far away.
Many of the children are raised by uneducated grandparents live an unsupervised life. The toll on their emotional and mental health can be severe, and some turn to crime. There are an estimated 60 million so called left-behind children under the age of 18 in rural China, according to an official report in 2013.
The boy has not been criminally charged, as he is younger than 14, the age for criminal responsibility in China. On August 2, he was sent to the city of Nanning for forced reform through education for three years.
