Gong Runbo is believed
to have lured the children to his apartment in Jiamusi city in Heilongjiang province
where he carried out the killings and often left the bodies to
decompose, the Beijing News said.
He was only stopped on
February 28, when a boy escaped from the killer and managed to alert the
police, according to the paper.
Officers sent to search
Gong's apartment came across a gruesome scenery of rotting bodies and
scattered bones, it said.
Four of the corpses were
still in a somewhat intact state and showed signs of having been
sexually abused prior to their deaths, according to the paper.
Forensic evidence led
police to conclude that perhaps more than 20 children had been killed in
the apartment, it said.
A 33-year-old man who
murdered six children after sexually assaulting them in northeast
China's Heilongjiang Province has been sentenced to death by the
Intermediate People's Court of Jiamusi City.
Gong Runbo, who had been
previously convicted of rape, killed the six children aged between 9 and
16 after luring them from street and Internet cafe to his rented
apartment in Jiamusi between March 2005 and February 2006.
He also lured
and molested five others aged between 12 and 13.
He was arrested on
February 28, when a boy managed to escape from the apartment and called
police. The police captured Gong in a nearby Internet cafe and found
four decomposing bodies and children's clothes in his apartment.
Wu Heping, spokesman for China's Ministry of Public Security, dismissed
reports that more than six children might have died after they ran DNA
tests on the clothes. Gong pleaded guilty at the court and said he would
not appeal.
He was put into prison in October 1996 for raping a young
girl and released after he served an imprisonment of eight years. Then
he chose to rent an apartment in a residential area of shanties instead
of returning to his former residence and reporting to the police station
there, thus successfully shunned attention from police. He spent most of
time playing computer games at an Internet cafe, the same as many of the
jobless in China.
Investigators said Gong took some victims to an
Internet cafe without being stopped, despite rules limiting children's
access to such sites. Most of the victims came from families where
parents were busy making a living all day long and had no time to take
care of children, said an earlier report.
Local police officers in
Jiamusi have been criticized for their slow response to missing children
reports as the murder spree lasted for nearly a year. Wu Heping
acknowledged slowness in investigation might have prolonged the killing.
"Sadly, six dead kids may have died because of our failings," he said.
The provincial police chief had ordered intensive inspections of rented
houses, migrant populations, and cases of missing people after Gong's
case.
