BEIJING: Five members of a fringe religious group in China went on trial yesterday for beating a woman to death at a McDonald’s restaurant, reportedly after she rebuffed their attempts to recruit
her.
The five are all members of a cult called Quannengshen, the official news agency Xinhua said, adding that they attacked the woman, surnamed Wu, after she refused to give them her phone number.
The group, whose name can be translated as Church of Almighty God, believe that Jesus has been reincarnated as a Chinese woman and refer to the Communist Party as the ‘great red dragon’.
It was outlawed by the government in the mid-1990s.
Images of the five accused, dressed in bright orange clothing and surrounded by 17 police officers, were posted online by Yantai Intermediate People’s Court in Shandong, in eastern China.
“The indictment charged the defendants Zhang Fan, Zhang Lidong, Lu Yingchun, Zhang Hang, Zhang Qiao jointly with intentional homicide,” it said on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter.
Zhang Lidong, Zhang Fan and Lu were also accused of “using an evil cult organisation to undermine the law”, the court’s Weibo page added.
Reports in May said six suspects had been detained, including a juvenile, whose case would be dealt with separately.
A online video emerged showing a man resembling Zhang striking out angrily with a pole, shouting “Damn you, devil! Go to hell!” as a woman yelled “Kill her! Beat her to death!”
The three minutes of footage, apparently shot on a mobile phone, only included a fraction of a second of what could be the victim. — AFP