A senior Chinese Communist Party official was executed...

A senior Chinese Communist Party official was executed for hiring hitmen to assassinate a political opponent and his wife and also for corruption, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
Li Changhe, a former party secretary in Pingdingshan in the central province of Henan, was executed by firing squad along with two men he hired to kill the political rival, it said.
Two other accomplices were sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, which is usually commuted to life imprisonment.
Li plotted to have former subordinate Lu Jingyi killed because Lu kept filing reports and complaints about his corrupt ways, it said.
Li used the two accomplices to hire the hitmen, an unemployed worker and an ex-convict, who broke into Lu's house one night in June 1999 and hacked his wife to death. Lu suffered serious wounds, it said.
The Higher Court of Henan also found Li guilty of taking some 138,000 yuan ($17,000) in bribes, it said.