Police recently found six women's bodies in Kaifeng, in Central China's Henan Province, who are suspected to have been killed by people they got to know through the Internet.
Two suspects have been detained, and it is said they often won the trust of girls between 12 to 18 years old by chatting with them on the Internet and then asking them out.
The case first received attention when the parents of a girl reported to the police that their daughter had been missing since May 15 and that she liked to surf on the Internet using the name "pretty baby."
The police visited Internet bars around her school and found out that an Internet user named "Meng Xia" had asked her out for a hamburger that noon.
Two days later the police found out that Meng Xia's real name is Li Song, a 34-year-old male from Kaifeng. Li confessed that he often dated girls he knew on the net and took them to a suburban house.
The police found the house and began to dig in the floor of one of the rooms. Within half an hour they had exhumed a woman's body.
Later, following Li's confession, the police dug up four more women's bodies that Li and his stated accomplice Xu Yuanqing had allegedly buried under a tree beside the house.
Another body was dug up in Li's cement shop in Nanchaitun village.
The cruel case astonished the entire city of Kaifeng. The police put a special team on the case and started to look for Xu Yuanqing, who on Wednesday afternoon was caught in East China's Shandong Province.
The six bodies have not been identified.
Internet chatting, esp. among teenagers, has grown in popularity in China in recent years.
(China Daily May 24, 2002)
