China has executed a couple guilty of throwing two young children from the window of an apartment building, in a dramatic news case that created much national outrage in 2020. Zhang Bo and Ye Chengchen, based on the reconstruction then accepted by the Intermediate People’s Court number 5 of Chongqing, were considered responsible for the fatal fall of a two-year-old girl and a one-year-old boy from the fifteenth floor of a skyscraper residential in Chongqing, a special municipality with thirty million inhabitants.
Zhang, the father of the two children, had started a relationship with Ye, initially unaware that his partner was married with children. Hence the criminal developments with the request for the “removal” of the two children from their lives which she “considered as obstacles” to their marriage and a “burden for their future life together”.
In November 2020, Zhang threw his children out of the apartment window in the absence of their mother, with whom he had agreed to divorce. Zhang and Ye were found guilty of conspiring “to kill their daughter and son by staging an accidental fall,” China Daily reported last year.
The death penalty, however, is from December 2023, while the sentence was carried out today. The news came on the same day as another high-profile execution: that of Wu Xieyu, found guilty of killing her mother by hitting her several times with a dumbbell in 2015, according to a statement from a Fujian court, relaunched by the media locals.
China keeps secret data on death sentences carried out each year, even though Amnesty International estimates that the Dragon is the leading executioner globallywith thousands of cases for crimes often ranging from drug trafficking to corruption and murder, with the most common means of execution being lethal injection.