Strong-arm debt collectors earn sympathy with sentence

Zhang Xitong, a retired official of 67, was sitting at home in Taiyuan, central China, watching television with his wife when three men entered his apartment with a fruit basket. One, named Li, was a associate of his son-in-law, who had been a dinner guest in the house.

The man asked if Mr Zhang could help them in a dispute with a cyclist whom they had knocked over, and the old man went down with them to the street below, where a red Santana car was waiting. Two of the men seized Mr Zhang by the arm, threw him in the back of the car and told him to be silent if he wanted to stay alive. They forced a sedative down his mouth and he fell asleep.

Mr Zhang was kidnapped as a hostage to force his son-in-law to pay a debt of 30,000 yuan (about HK$27,900) for the purchase of flour which he owed Li. He was driven to a county in Henan province over 1,000 kilometres away and detained in a room where his guard carried a knife used to kill pigs and threatened to use it on him if he made trouble.

After six days of this torture, Mr Zhang was driven with a mask over his face to a remote dyke, the money was paid over by his daughter and son-in-law, and he was released, so badly shaken that he had to spend two months in hospital.

The case of Mr Zhang came to light last week when a court in Puyang city, Henan province, sentenced the four leaders of the gang that kidnapped him to prison terms ranging from 11 years to life, for kidnapping and detaining 28 people in seven provinces and cities and obtaining goods and money totalling 360,000 yuan since 1994.

For the authorities, the gang were a group of bandits who had committed the largest crime involving a debt-collection company in the communist era. Such companies are banned in China.