By Enyichukwu Enemanna
China on Monday executed a 62-year-old man who killed 35 people in a car rampage in the southern city of Zhuhai in November, an attack described as the country’s deadliest since 2014.
The attacker, Fan Weiqiu, had on 11 November deliberately driven a small SUV through crowds of people exercising outside a sports complex, an attack that also injured 45 people.
He was sentenced to death last month, with a court stating that his motives “were extremely vile and the nature of the crime extremely egregious”.
A Zhuhai court on Monday “executed Fan Weiqiu in accordance with the execution order issued by the Supreme People’s Court”, state broadcaster CCTV reported.
The municipal public prosecutor “sent personnel to supervise the execution in accordance with the law”, CCTV added.
The attack by Fan sparked widespread public anger and soul-searching in China about the state of society.
He was detained at the scene with self-inflicted knife wounds and fell into a coma, police said at the time.
At his trial last month, he pleaded guilty in front of some of the victims’ families, officials, and members of the public, state media reported.
The court found that he “decided to vent his anger” over “a broken marriage, personal frustrations, and dissatisfaction with the division of property after divorce”.
It concluded that the methods he used were “particularly cruel, and the consequences particularly severe, posing significant harm to society”.
CCTV also reported on Monday that a separate court in eastern Jiangsu province had carried out the death penalty on a man who killed eight people and wounded 17 in a mass stabbing in November.
Xu Jiajin, a 21-year-old former student who attacked a vocational school in the city of Wuxi, was executed “in accordance with the law”, CCTV reported.
He too had been sentenced to death in December, with the court concluding that his crime was “extraordinarily serious”, CCTV said.
Xu was permitted to “meet with his close relatives” before his execution, the broadcaster added.
China classifies death penalty statistics as a state secret, but rights groups, including Amnesty International, believe the country executes thousands of people every year.
