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Mark O'Neill

WHEN POLICE ARRESTED China's most wanted man on a crowded street in the southwest city of Chongqing, they only had a few seconds.

'My gun was ready and, if I had had a fraction of a second, I could have fired it,' Zhang Jun was reported in the mainland media as having told interrogators after his arrest.

'I did not even have time to kill myself. I did not expect the police to catch me so soon. The street was full of people, some playing mahjong and with children running around.'

The arrest, just before 10pm on September 19, was splashed across the front pages of mainland newspapers, with a picture of Zhang with tousled hair and glacial eyes.

From 1994 until his capture, Zhang and his gang committed 17 robberies in five provinces, in which they killed 26 people, wounded 20 and stole six million yuan (about HK$5.6 million) in cash, gold and jewellery.

Zhang, 34, was not only a cold-blooded killer but also a Casanova, with six known mistresses, aged between 20 and 48, and dozens of girlfriends.

According to accounts which have appeared in the mainland media, he turned several into important members of his gang, who hid money, acted as couriers for arms and ammunition and sometimes did the killings.

Sexual conquest, murder and robbery were expressions of rage because of his childhood poverty, loneliness and hatred of a society in which he found himself at the bottom of the heap. Press reports say it was the refusal of two women to sleep with him that led to his first murder. In 1993, in the southwest province of Yunnan, he met two young women and demanded sex with them. They refused, he became enraged and shot them dead.

He committed his first robbery in November 1994 at a rural market in Chongqing. He followed a farmer who had just sold his produce into a public toilet, killed him and stole the 6,000 yuan payment.

The following January, also in Chongqing, he followed the head of a construction team who had just withdrawn 50,000 yuan from a bank, beat him to death and stole his money.

In December that year, he raided a store in Chongqing, stealing 600,000 yuan in gold and jewellery and firing six shots at a crowd of onlookers, killing one member of the staff and wounding two customers.

A year later, on Christmas Day, he attacked another shop in Chongqing, stealing 700,000 yuan in gold and jewellery and killing one.

In June this year, he attacked a bank van in Chongqing carrying money, killing a female bank clerk and a taxi driver, wounding two security guards and escaping with 110,000 yuan in cash.

His most spectacular crime of all came on September 1 this year, in the city of Changde in Hunan province. Just after 6pm, a branch of the Agriculture Bank was taking a collection of money from sub-branches when three masked men burst in, firing at random.

They killed three security guards and two bank clerks, firing more than 20 bullets from two guns, while an accomplice killed a taxi driver on the street outside. But a member of the bank staff rang the alarm and locked the money, so the gang fled, empty-handed. As they did, the gang killed a passer-by and wounded three others, including a three-year-old child.

It was one of the bloodiest and most spectacular bank robberies in the history of communist China. Hunan province mobilised nearly 10,000 police and soldiers who set up checkpoints on 194 roads and swept hotels, guesthouses, bus stations, ports and construction sites.

But Zhang slipped through the net. On September 3 he escaped to Yiyang, another city in Hunan, and the next day took a bus to Changsha, the provincial capital, where he caught a plane to Guangzhou.

He reportedly stayed at the airport for three hours, making several phone calls, and then took a flight to Chongqing. On September 6, the Ministry of Public Security published a national warrant for his arrest, making him the most wanted man in China.

Zhang told interrogators that he did not expect the police to catch him for a further two weeks and was planning to hijack a plane to escape from China.

But Chongqing police got on his trail on September 13 when they took in for questioning Yang Minyan, 28, one of Zhang's four mistresses in the city. She initially denied any knowledge of him but, after being presented with evidence, confessed that Zhang had come to the city on September 5 and sold a car for 60,000 yuan because he needed money.

Police discovered that he had arranged a rendezvous with another mistress outside a hospital in the city on the evening of September 19 and blanketed the area with plainclothes officers. When Zhang arrived just before 10pm, the woman handed him a travel bag and he walked away.

Officers then pounced on him, twisting his right arm and removing his gun before he could use it. In the bag, they found 178 bullets and an army-issue hand grenade. A search of his house revealed seven hunting rifles, bullet-proof vests, home-made bombs, a book on how to make rifles, a directory of light arms and newspaper cuttings on the September 1 bank robbery.

Accounts issued by the police of Zhang's interrogation show that even then he did not lose his cool. 'I have almost died many times but this time I will certainly die. All I am thinking about is the form death will take.

'All I want to do is die. To live until now was no easy matter. My only regret is that I did not have the opportunity to take my own life.'

Zhang was one of seven children born to a poor farming family in Hunan province. With the death of his mother when he was 14, his character began to change. He became ruthlessly tough and, while a 17-year-old high school student, was sentenced to three years reform through labour for wounding someone with a knife.

The Zhang case has aroused great interest among mainland psychologists who have tried to analyse how someone could behave with such brutality. Psychologists see Zhang as harbouring a deep grudge against society and the established order.

'He came from a poor family and, after losing his mother, received no affection,' said Zhou Jue, the director of the Rongge Psychology Counselling Centre in Chongqing. 'Zhang is a man of powerful passions and desires. He does not care what others think or feel and has no regret.

'He has a strong sex drive and has had many mistresses and girlfriends. But he has no normal affection for them. They are simply a tool for him to satisfy himself and achieve what he wants.'

Zhang told police that he had forced one of the mistresses, Quan Hongyan, the one who gave him the travel bag just before he was arrested, to kill a man in Changsha in May this year, to prove her loyalty to him.

'He is anti-social,' Mr Zhou said. 'He wants to see the established order in chaos and covered in blood. It makes him happy and compensates for that bitterness he feels from his poor and difficult childhood.'

Lu Zhengxin, a researcher in criminal psychology at the Southwest University of Politics and Law, said that behind each of Zhang's crimes was a woman.

'Not only was there strong sexual attraction but he wanted to impress them and show that he could do something. There was mutual dependence and encouragement, leading to these astonishing cases.'

Mark O'Neill is a member of the Post's Beijing bureau



'Casanova' killer's defiant last stand