After a weeklong nationwide manhunt, police arrested a fired cotton-mill worker who is suspected in bombings that killed 108 people, Chinese state media reported yesterday. Jin Ruchao was taken into custody in the southern seaside city of Beihai and confessed to bombing four workers' dormitories in the northern Chinese city of Shijiazhuang on March 16, the reports said. They added that Jin also confessed to killing his girlfriend with a knife a week earlier in southwest China's Yunnan Province. The bombings were the deadliest crime in China in decades, and they occurred when people throughout the country were talking about a rash of fatal explosions. Some appear to have been accidents, but criminals in China have easy access to explosives used for construction.
Officials blame a mad bomber who died in the explosion.
But many residents told reporters the official account was an attempt to cover up the fact that schoolchildren had been required to make fireworks. The controversy over the school explosion, which prompted Premier Zhu Rongji to pledge to make China a safer place, made authorities especially eager to solve the Shijiazhuang bombings. The report said authorities arrested Jin yesterday morning in Beihai, in southern China's Guangxi region. It showed police in camouflage uniforms putting a smiling Jin, who is 41 and was described as deaf in earlier reports, into a black car outside a primary school. Many residents and some police in Shijiazhuang, an industrial city of 1.6 million about 170 miles southwest of Beijing, doubt that one man could have set off the four explosions without help.