Hunt for killers after four Chinese slain in Papua New Guinea attack

Police in Port Moresby are still hunting attackers who hacked to death four Chinese nationals at a grocery store on Monday, the Chinese embassy in Papua New Guinea said yesterday.

Shop owner Wang Chuanhai , his wife Jiang Qin and two employees, Wang Jianguo and Cai Liangen , suffered multiple stab wounds from suspected butcher's knives. One victim was almost beheaded.

The masked attackers broke into the shop in the city's Koki area around 9pm, Yin Weijiang , the embassy's first secretary, told the South China Morning Post yesterday.

The shop was closed and some local workers were making bread on the ground floor when the attackers broke in and ordered them to face a wall. The four victims, who had been having dinner with the owner's brother on the first floor, were killed when they went downstairs after hearing the noise. The brother survived by locking himself in a room and calling police.

All the victims, who held Chinese passports, came from Shanghai and had permanent residency in the Pacific country, Yin said.

The killers took a small amount of cash from the shop's till. The brother told police he only saw one attacker, but local workers said there were more.

Calling the murders "brutal and cowardly", Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Peter O'Neill vowed yesterday that police would "get all the help necessary to track down and bring the perpetrators to justice".