Authorities in China have arrested a man for allegedly killing his wife, dismembering her body and flushing some of her remains down the toilet.
According to a city’s legal authority, Xu Guoli, 55, murdered his partner when she was asleep due to ‘conflicts in family life.’ After killing her, he allegedly dumped part of his wife’s remains in various locations and got rid of her body tissue ‘partially through the toilet at their home in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province.’
Mr. Xu was arrested on Friday, August 7 in the city of Hangzhou on suspicion of intentional homicide, after the Hangzhou Municipal People’s Procuratorate, the government organ for legal supervision gave the green light for his arrest on Thursday, August 6.
In a statement, the city’s legal authority said Mr. Xu’s method of crime was cruel, and the nature of his act was ‘evil’.
The statement said Mr. Xu went to the police last month to report that his wife had left home in the middle of the night and ‘mysteriously’ gone missing.
He claimed his spouse had vanished before he woke up on July 5, and added that they had spent a day ‘happily and harmoniously’ with their daughter the day before.
In surveillance footage released by CCTV, Ms. Lai was seen entering the lift with her daughter at around 5 pm on July 4. Two days later, Mr. Xu and his daughter went to the police to file a missing person report.
When Police conducted a thorough search in the community and viewed around 6,000 hours worth of security camera footage, they failed to find any traces that Ms. Lai left the building.
Speaking to a local TV station on July 17, Mr. Xu said that his wife could have left with other individuals in the middle of the night. He also went ahead to voice his concerns about the future of him and his daughter.
He said: ‘What about my daughter’s life? What about my life? When exactly will my wife return? [We] don’t even know if she is alive or dead.’
A special team was later assigned to investigate the case on July 21 and during the investigation, they decided to drain the septic tank in Mr. Xu’s residential compound where they discovered human tissue.
According to state broadcaster CCTV, officers spent 25 hours extracting the waste and transported it to a lab with 38 trucks. Lab workers identified suspected human tissue in the refuse on the next day.
Police invited Mr. Xu for questioning at 1 am on July 23, and after nine hours of interrogation, he admitted to murdering his partner and cutting her body into pieces.
Mr.Xu confessed to the police that he had felt dissatisfied with Ms. Lai due to ‘conflicts in family life’, which made him killed her in her sleep in the early hours of July 5.
The couple had divorced for unspecified reasons before they tied the knot for the second time in 2008.
The case is now under further investigation.
