World

China Nabs Suspect In Fatal Bombings

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

March 23, 2001 / 8:34 AM EST / CBS

Chinese police arrested a deaf fugitive on Friday over a string of explosions that killed at least 108 people in the northern industrial city of Shijiazhuang, Xinhua news agency reported.

Jin Ruchao "confessed all his crimes" after his capture in the beach resort of Beihai in southwestern Guangxi province, the official news agency said.

Jin also admitted to killing a woman in southwestern China, a spokeswoman for the Public Security Ministry said.

Despite official reports that Jin was deaf and communicated with a pen and paper, state television showed him apparently speaking easily with police.

Police have not disclosed a motive or said whether they are looking for other suspects.

State television showed police in camouflage uniforms bundling Jin, relaxed and smiling in a grey shirt and brown trousers, into a black car outside a Beihai primary school as a small crowd watched from a distance.

He was picked up after a nationwide manhunt in which a bounty of $18,000 was put on his head.

"The case of the huge explosion in Shijiazhuang which shocked the whole nation on March 16 has been solved," Xinhua said.

Explosions ripped through four dormitories in Shijiazhuang just before dawn last Friday, sparking fears over public safety and alarming top leaders already worried over social breakdown amid wrenching industrial reform in Chinese cities.

Jin, 40, also admitted to the murder of his girlfriend in the southern province of Yunan a week before the blasts, Xinhua said.

Beihai, near the Chinese border with Vietnam, is notorious for its smuggling and gangs. It is a jumping-off point for illegal emigration to Southeast Asia organized by so-called "snakehead" crime syndicates.

Jin's photograph was splashed across national newspapers and broadcast on local television stations around the country.

Police picked up his trail in Beihai on Thursday evening with the help of the public, Xinhua said, without giving details.

He was being questioned and would stand trial, it said.

One of the nearly simultaneous blasts flattened a five-story dormitory block housing 48 families at Shijiazhuang's Number 3 cotton mill.

The official death toll is 108, with 38 injured, but unofficial estimates go much higher.

Police have said Jin was their main suspect but he could have had help from accomplices or a criminal gang in Shijiazhuang, capital of northern Hebei province and a center of the textile industry.

He was fired from the Number 3 cotton mill in 1983 for "hooliganism" but kept a room in the factory's dormitory.

However, many Shijiazhuang residents doubt that Jin could have coordinated four blasts.

They point to a host of social problems in Shijiazhuang that could be behind the blasts, including unemployment, corruption and organized crime.

Shijiazhuang is filled with laid off workers seething with resentmet against a socialist state that once promised to look after them for life.

China laid off 1.4 million workers from the textile sector between 1998 and 2000 under a program to cut production and boost efficiency.

Following the blasts, China launched a nationwide crackdown on the use of explosives, which are widely available and frequently used by ethnic separatists, blackmailers, criminal gangs, robbers, and even jilted lovers.