It was the type of story the Beijing tabloids would usually go to town on. A sweet 13-year-old girl from an intellectual family strangled to death on a public bus in front of her parents, allegedly by a crazed female conductor over a 1 yuan bus fare. But the media was conspicuously quiet on this one. As the girl's elderly parents now try to cope with the grief of losing their only child, they are further haunted by the belief that the state-run bus company is wielding its corporate clout to smother the story. Yan Jiqin was a pretty, cheerful, exceptionally bright teenager who had her heart set on studying law at Cambridge University. On October 4 she boarded a bus in Beijing with her parents on the way home from a shopping spree, her bag full of English books and pop music CDs she had bought. Her 74-year-old father, Yan Sixian - who has been a physics lecturer at China's eminent Tsinghua University for decades - was weary after the day out and looked for a seat on the bus. All the seats were taken, but his wife noticed that a conductor was sitting in a seat reserved for the elderly, and she asked her to move. When she refused, a passenger got up and let the professor sit down, embarrassing the conductor, who glared at the mother and daughter. Another female conductor took the standard 1 yuan fare from them but her humiliated colleague shouted that they should pay double. Outraged at being cheated, Jiqin exchanged angry words with the woman, who flew into a rage. 'The conductor jumped up, yanked my girl by the ponytail and grabbed her by the throat. I tried to push her off but I couldn't,' Jiqin's mother, Ms Zheng, 57, claimed. 'Jiqin fell unconscious and dropped to the ground, and then the woman kicked her.' The parents took Jiqin to a hospital in a taxi and a few hours later she was pronounced dead. At this point, the parents contend, the bus company management went into overdrive to try to keep the story quiet. They insisted the two parents be admitted to the hospital, even though after the girl's death they both underwent a check-up and had been given the all-clear. In hospital they were heavily sedated for nine days. According to the parents, the company posted security guards outside the ward and threatened family members who tried to locate witnesses to the attack. The manager of the bus firm, the Beijing Bashi Company, declined to comment for this column, despite being told of the detailed allegations the parents were making against him and his company. Several journalists from state television and mainstream newspapers went to the hospital to cover the story, but most of them left after talking to the company officials, Jiqin's aunt said. 'Some did interviews with us but the reports were never published. Journalists later told us that four company officials went around to all the media offices to convince them not to report the story.' A journalist from the Beijing Evening News confirmed that she had been asked by her editors to write a story on the killing, but they later said they would not use it. 'They just said they were concerned about the social influence of the story.' More than two weeks after the killing, only one English-language daily and the Chinese-language Beijing News had carried short reports. An editor with the Beijing News confirmed that the bus company had made attempts to stop their story from being published. 'Big companies do this kind of thing a lot in China. We expect it,' he said. The family's claims support a wider perception here that while the government's efforts to control the press for political purposes are well known, the nascent business community is also often able to throttle free speech by using a combination of contacts, corruption and coercion. Peter Goff is a Beijing-based journalist