Some are calling it the trial of the century. And now, after court delays, a demand for execution and a call by the victims’s father for a trial on live TV, the case of a Nanjing student’s murder in Yunnan Province last year got under way this morning.
The trial was originally scheduled to be held over a month ago, but at 15:00 yesterday, the victim’s father revealed to the media that the case’s pre-trial meeting had been held and that the trial shall begin today.
The case is being heard in the the Intermediate People’s Court of Xishuangbanna Prefecture of Yunnan Province on account it is the authority presiding over the crime scene.
Li Sheng, the victim’s father, also revealed that he had applied in the pre-trial meeting to reduce the amount of compensation sought from ¥150,000 to ¥100,000, reports The Paper. He however also said, “We hope to express our attitude through the application and ask for Hong Qiao to be executed; not for money nor eyeball”.
In the grisly case which has attracted much public attention ever since, his daughter, Li Mouyue (李某月), a 21-year-old college student in Nanjing, was murdered by her boyfriend and two others on 9 July of last year in Menghai County of Yunnan.
She had been lured there from Nanjing under false pretences by her boyfriend, Hong Qiao (洪峤), together with two other male suspects, surnamed Cao and Zhang. It is believed that once there, Hong had instructed the others to kill Li.
Family members of female college students in Nanjing close to the victim have revealed a possible motive for the three suspects to be an emotional dispute not long before the trip to Yunnan.
After the incident, Hong pretended to help Li’s parents to find their daughter. Upon their arrival in Nanjing, he took Li’s father to an Apple Store to try to supposedly locate her mobile phone, but to no avail. Later the same day, Hong even accompanied Li’s parents to Nanjing’s Maqun Police Station to report her disappearance.
That was on 13 July. “Hong has been deceiving us”, Li’s father told China News at the time, after discovering his daughter had already been dead for 4 days.
Hong has since cited psychological issues, a claim rejected by public security organs and the Menghai County People’s Procuratorate.
Should Hong receive the death penalty, it shall be the second execution for the murder of a female Nanjing student in just over a year.
The ultimate punishment was also handed down in October of 2020 to the murderer of a Nanjing Medical University student in 1992. She had been raped, bludgeoned and left to die; her body thrown into a courtyard sewer in the university campus.
