Xinhua (note: China’s official press agency), Aug. 26
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XI’AN: Two obsessed female Falun Gong practitioners admitted killing a maid in northwestern China in an act they claimed would release her soul from purgatory, local police said.
Police officers in Xianyang city, in Northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, were told on the morning of March 1 that Mai Xinping, a maid at the Hongbin Hostel, had been strangled in a room.
They went to the hostel, south of a coach station on Xilan Road, and discovered the body on a bed, apparently strangled with a nylon rope.
Marks on the body indicated that a struggle had taken place.
Police suspected the two women, from Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, as they had left the hostel room about the same time the murder was reported.
One of the women’s identification card numbers was recorded when she checked into the hostel.
Police questioned her friends in Xinjiang and discovered she was Lin Chunmei, an obsessed Falun Gong practitioner.
The co-accused, Wen Yuping, was not found by police until July. Once arrested, the pair said they killed the maid to help her “enjoy happiness in heaven.”
In an interview with Xinhua, the women, who are in police custody, said they had done “a good thing,” and committed the murder simply to release souls from purgatory.
They gave police full details of the killing. Lin, 38, who used to work at the Construction Bank in Xinjiang, began practising Falun Gong in 1998.
[…]
Under the influence of Falun Gong and leader Li Hongzhi, several thousand people in China have committed suicide or murder. The Chinese Government outlawed the cult in 1998.