By Charlie Charalambous
TWO CHINESE students were yesterday sentenced to 25 years each for the brutal double killing last year of two of their compatriots.
Passing sentence, the Criminal Court sitting in Limassol described the two as “barbaric and evil”.
In the 12-page verdict the court called the crime “one of the most frightening and evil which has shocked public opinion”.
The verdict went on to say the killings had been committed with “unbelievable barbarity in which the victims were abused and strangled without provocation in order to take the little money they were suspected of having”.
Accused Wang Yang, 21, and 22-year-old Bu Hua Cheng received one the stiffest penalties ever handed down by a Cypriot court for the charge of manslaughter.
The court said it took into account their clean criminal record, young age, and the fact that they had co-operated with police.
The victims, a student couple, were sexually tortured before being beaten with an iron bar and strangled. Their bodies were then taken by car to the Troodos mountains and dumped in a ravine, where they were discovered on December 2 last year, the day after the killings.
Wang and Bu had first pleaded not guilty to the premeditated murder of female compatriot Jiang Ming Xia, 23, and then to the bludgeoning of her male partner Lou Jian Hui, also 23, with an iron bar after forcing him to watch her suffer.
But following a plea bargain deal the two accused pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
The victims’ bloodied bodies were wrapped in a blanket, put in the boot of a car and taken from their Limassol flat in Mesa Yitonia to the Troodos mountains, where they were thrown over a 100-metre drop close to Trooditissa monastery.
The killers believed their victims had some $3,000 stashed in their tiny apartment, but they never found any hidden money.
Clothing and possessions belonging to the couple were strewn across the mountain roads as the killers desperately tried to locate the money.
All four studied at the same private Limassol college and were part of the island’s 600-strong Chinese student community.
