China executes couple who threw two young children from 15th floor

Couple sentenced to death in 2021 (representative)

Beijing:

China executed a couple on Wednesday who sparked national outrage after throwing their two young children out of an apartment building window.

Zhang Bo and Ye Chengchen were previously found responsible for the deaths of a two-year-old girl and a one-year-old boy who fell from the 15th floor of a residential building in Chongqing, southwest China.

Zhang, a father of two, began an affair with Ye, who initially did not know he was married and had children.

She then urged Zhang to kill his two children, which she considered “an obstacle to their marriage” and “a burden to their future life together,” the Chongqing Fifth Intermediate People’s Court said in a statement.

In November 2020, Zhang threw the child out of the window of his apartment without the presence of his mother, whom he had agreed to divorce.

Both men were convicted of plotting to “kill their daughter and young son by accidentally falling from the 15th floor of an apartment building,” the state-backed China Daily reported last year.

The couple was sentenced to death in December 2021 and executed on Wednesday, the court said.

The news came on the same day as the high-profile execution of Wu Xieyu, who killed his mother in 2015 by repeatedly hitting her with a dumbbell, a statement from a court in eastern Fujian province said.

China keeps data on its use of the death penalty secret, with thousands of people executed and sentenced to death each year, although human rights group Amnesty International estimates it has the world’s largest number of executioners.

Crimes ranging from drug trafficking to corruption and murder are frequently punished by death, with lethal injection being the most common execution method.

Zhang and Ye’s crimes shocked China with their cold-blooded premeditation, and also shocked the teenagers who were the victims.

Their executions quickly topped the list of trending topics on Chinese social media site Weibo on Wednesday, with nearly 200 million views.

“Today is such a good day,” read a well-received comment on a related post on Xinhua, the official news agency.

Another wrote, “You deserve it.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)