Chinese authorities suspect that the woman who gouged out a 6-year-old boy’s eyes was his aunt who later killed herself, state media said on Wednesday, adding a surprising twist to a gruesome case with conflicting details.
Police in the city of Linfen in northern Shanxi province have identified the boy’s aunt Zhang Huiying as a suspect because the boy’s blood was found on her clothes, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Six days after the boy was attacked, Zhang killed herself by jumping into a well.
Initial reports said the boy, Gua Bin, was lured by an unidentified woman with a strange accent into a field on August 24 where she used an unspecified tool to gouge out his eyes.
Xinhua did not cite a possible motive for the aunt to attack the boy. The police finding seemed to conflict with the family’s initial comments on the boy’s assailant, which cited him as saying that the woman spoke with an accent from outside the area and had hair that was dyed blonde.
One of the case investigators reached by phone, a police officer in Fenxi county surnamed Liu, referred only to the Xinhua report and refused to answer further questions, saying he was not authorised to speak to the media. Calls to the city and county’s police bureaus’ propaganda departments rang unanswered. Guo’s mother’s mobile phone also rang unanswered.
State media previously had raised the possibility that the boy’s corneas were taken for sale because of a donor shortage in China, but police said the boy’s eyeballs were found at the scene, and that the corneas hadn’t been removed. At the time, though, Guo’s father said the family had not actually seen the eyeballs.