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Shenyang Police Announce the Arrest of Wang Qiang in a Years-Long Series of Killings and Rapes

For years a man had attacked couples along Shenyang's canals and parks. A tip from a fellow inmate led police to Wang Qiang, 28, in his mother's village.

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Illustration of police officers and a patrol vehicle outside a small station among apartment blocks on a snowy night in northeastern China. Not an actual scene from the case.

For years, couples along the canals and in the parks of Shenyang had been attacked and killed. On July 19, 2003, the city's police announced that they had arrested a suspect, and that he had confessed.

The Shenyang Public Security Bureau said the suspect, Wang Qiang, 28, from Kuandian County in Liaoning, had been arrested on July 14 in Kaiyuan, where his mother lived, and had confessed to killings, rapes and robberies. Police said that since 1992 he had moved between Shenyang, Tieling and Shanghai committing crimes, and that he had twice been sent to labor reeducation for theft and extortion. A technical examination on July 15 confirmed him as the suspect in the series the city police had designated "Serial Case No. 54" and the provincial police "Case No. 3."

The killings the police described included couples killed beside the city's canals in 2000 and in a university botanical garden in October 2002, with the women raped and their bicycles taken. Police said that in July 2000 alone, Wang killed five people in two attacks in Kaiyuan: a mother and son, and a man, his wife and her sister. Investigators had described the killer as a short man with a northern accent who rode a bicycle and preyed on couples.

The break came from a jail. During a campaign urging detainees to confess and report crimes, a man held for motorcycle robbery told guards on July 1 that a man named Wang Qiang had once tried to recruit him to rob people in parks. After two fruitless trips to Kaiyuan, detectives found Wang on their third.

When Wang went on trial in Shenyang in March 2005, prosecutors charged him with 45 killings and 10 rapes beginning in January 1995.

The police account said Wang was caught walking along a village road, while a later magazine report said he was arrested while fishing by a river.

Sources