A couple has been executed after the father killed his two children by throwing them off a 15th-floor balcony.
The father, Zhang Bo, murdered his kids after his new girlfriend, Ye Chengchen, told him she saw them as a “burden on their future together.”
The pair was sentenced to death in 2021 after the two children were pushed off the balcony of a residential tower in China’s Chongqing in 2020.
Ye had been unaware that Zhang had been married with two children at the time.
She then urged Zhang to kill the kids, which she saw “as obstacles” to their future and a “burden on their future life together,” according to a statement from Chongqing No. 5 Intermediate People’s Court.
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The couple was put to death on Wednesday, though it is not clear what method was used. The most common method in China is lethal injection.
In November 2020, Zhang threw his two children – daughter Zhang Ruixue, 2, and son Zhang Yangrui, 1 – out of the window of his apartment.
Videos of Zhang after the incident show him grief-stricken at what he had just done, and he was seen banging his head on the wall and sobbing uncontrollably.
At the time, Zhang claimed that he was asleep when the children went off the balcony and said he woke up to people shouting downstairs.
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Chen Meilin, the children’s mother, said that Zhang had asked to take care of his daughter on the day he killed them both.
Chen added that Zhang’s girlfriend had slit her wrists just before he killed the children.
She said: “At that time, Zhang was on a video phone call with Ye. She slit her wrists and then Zhang got scared. The phone was dropped, he picked up the two children, and threw them from the balcony.”
The father later admitted that he and his girlfriend had planned to kill them so they could start a new life together.
Chen said: “The moment I heard my kids were actually thrown out of the 15th floor by their father and the mistress, I couldn’t find any words to describe my feelings.
“I couldn’t imagine what my kids had experienced from the 15th floor to the ground. Were they desperate? Were they afraid?”
Despite denying the allegations, the couple was found guilty of conspiring “to kill his daughter and younger son by staging an accidental fall from the 15th floor of his apartment building,” a local news outlet reported last year.
Death sentences are frequently handed out in China for crimes ranging from drug trafficking to corruption and murder.
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