Three people were killed after masked gunmen pulled off a raid on a bank in the southern Chinese province of Jiangxi and escaped with 500,000 yuan (60,250 dollars), state press reported Monday.
The robbery occurred Saturday evening at a branch of the China Agriculture Bank in Nanchang city when "four or five" robbers burst into the bank with guns blazing, killing two customers, the Jianghuai Morning Post said in its online edition.
The robbers then demanded two bank employees open up the bank's safe before disappearing with the money in a cab, it said.
Police later located the vehicle some 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the scene with the cab driver found strangled to death.
The Nanchang police have offered a 100,000 yuan reward for information leading to the arrest of the gang, the paper said.
The violent robbery follows a string of similar violent bank heists in neighboring Hunan and Sichuan provinces, which had supposedly come to an end with last month's arrest of notorious gangster Zhang Jue.
According to state press reports, following interrogation Zhang confessed to at least two murders and numerous robberies that began in 1993.
He is suspected of killing over 30 people in seven violent robberies during the period, while also allegedly forcing his accomplices to commit murders in an effort to build trust among gang members, reports said.
He is not only the main suspect in a September 1 botched armored car robbery that left seven people dead in Changde, Hunan province, but he is also believed to have masterminded a June bank robbery in Chongqing that left two bank clerks dead.
Thirteen other suspects were arrested in the September 1 raid, prompting the state press to report that public menace number one had been put away.
Police seized two pistols, seven shotguns, two grenades, two homemade bombs and 1,949 bullets a surprising amount of weapons in a country where firearms are illegal.
More than 20 years of economic reforms and a widening gap between China's rich and poor have also seen an alarming increase of violent crime and murder, with criminal cases jumping 39 percent from 1995 to 1999 and murders up 40 percent in the last 10 years, state statistics show -- BEIJING (AFP)
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