A truck driver has gone on trial in Beijing accused of murdering 14 prostitutes during a methodical three-year killing spree in the Chinese capital, a court official said Thursday.
"A verdict on Hua Ruijiao will be coming soon," an official at the Beijing Number Two People's Court told AFP.
The 28-year-old was arrested in June and his trial began Wednesday, the official said.
Hua is accused of picking up prostitutes in his cement truck at a shopping center next to Beijing's Sanlitun diplomatic district.
He allegedly had sex with the women before strangling them, the Beijing Evening News reported.
The murders began in 1998 and all occurred between late night and early morning cement deliveries to construction sites in Beijing's booming eastern district.
China's police and state media normally do not report such crimes until they are solved, a practice that has long contributed to China's image as a law-abiding society.
However since the beginning of Hua's trial, the local press has printed a series of stories peppered with gruesome details seemingly taken from police records and an alleged confession.
According to the Life Times newspaper, the first body was discovered in September 1998 in a cornfield in eastern Beijing and the second in a women's apartment in July 1999.
Two more bodies were discovered late last year, also in an eastern Beijing cornfield, while other bodies were found in garbage dumps, including three found in July stuffed into a well covered with a steel manhole cover.
Only two of the 14 women have been positively identified. Most of the prostitutes were not from Beijing, having left their home towns to work where people would not recognize them, as is common in China.
According to reports, Hua would pull up in his truck, sound the horn, and begin a macabre and seemingly arbitrary selection process for his next victim.
"The eighth one had the longest hair and the 11th had the shortest. The ninth was the tallest," the Beijing Evening Post quoted him as saying.
Hua, married with a two-year-old son, also allegedly kept around 20 eyelash brushes in his home police believe belonged to the victims.
Beijing prosecutors say Hua is sane enough to stand trial and point to the meticulous way he disposed of the bodies.
Press reports said Hua claimed to have begun the killing spree as a result of discovering in 1994 his then-girlfriend was a prostitute.
"After this, I found that these 'young ladies' were intolerable and it was in 1998 that I had the urge to kill them," he was quoted as saying -- Beijing (AFP)
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