CHINA. TWO PEOPLE KILLED FOR DEATHS OF JAPANESE TOURISTS

an intermediate court in the city of Xian, China, on orders from the Shaanxi Province Supreme People's Court, executed Hai Ting and Cao Xiude, two men convicted of killing three Japanese tourists during a robbery. On 7 June 1993, Hai and Cao came to Xian from their native Guilin in southwestern China to plot a robbery, the Xian-based Sanqin Metropolitan News said. They discovered there was a Japanese tour group at the ANA Grand Castle Hotel and went to a sixth-story room where they knew some of the tourists were staying. After knocking on the door, the two robbers tied up two brothers and a sister - Tsutomu Sugiyama, Soichiro Sugiyama and Fumi Abe - with leather belts and stole more than 200,000 yen plus foreign exchange coupons, the paper said. They stabbed two of the tourists together with paper-cutting knives in the hotel room bathtub and stabbed the other to death on a bed.  In July 2004, the two were arrested in Guilin on suspicion of the murders. The intermediate court held a hearing for Hai and Cao on February 25, 2005, and the following month the court imposed the death sentences plus confiscation of all their personal property. Both defendants appealed, but the provincial court upheld the sentence, citing 13 "scientific and technological" pieces of evidence, including fingerprints, the Sanqin Metropolitan News said.