April 22 (UPI) — China on Tuesday executed a man for the 2024 murder of a Japanese boy, the Japanese embassy in China said.
The embassy told the BBC Tuesday it had received a statement from the embassy that Zhong Changchun, who was arrested in September of 2024 for the crime, has been put to death.
Zhong stabbed the victim, a 10-year-old boy who was on his way to a Japanese school in the Chinese city of Shenzhen earlier that same month, on Sept. 18.
The case had resulted in diplomatic tensions, as Sept. 18 is the anniversary of the Mukden Incident of 1931, in which an explosion destroyed a portion of a Japanese-owned railway track near the Chinese city of Mukden, which started a chain of events that led to the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
There was an online furor after the boy was murdered due the political sensitivity of the date of the crime, which included allegations of the attack being xenophobic in nature.
“The government of Japan considers the murder of a completely innocent child to be an unforgivable crime, and we take this execution with the utmost solemnity,” the Japanese embassy said in its statement to the BBC.
The embassy said it had been informed of the execution by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs but was not told when the execution occurred or how it was carried out. Japanese officials had previously reported that the verdict in Zhong’s case made no mention of Japan, or if he had said he had purposely targeted the boy because he was from China.
