London police find the dead body of missing Chinese PhD student

London police have found the dead body of a woman believed to be Yan Sihong, a Chinese PhD student who went missing almost two weeks ago.

Yesterday, police in Westminster in central London issued a public appeal for help in finding the 35-year-old student from Shenyang, studying at King’s College London, who had been reported as missing on Monday.

Police say that Yan was last seen on February 14th at her university. The South China Morning Post reports that she was supposed to meet with friends on February 16th, but did not show up or reply to their messages.

Meanwhile, King’s College has said that Yan’s email account was last logged into on February 16th. And, in a Weibo post seeking to enlist Chinese netizens help in finding her lost daughter, Yan’s mother writes that she spoke to her daughter on video chat on the night of February 15th.

When she was unable to get in contact with Yan for their regular video chat this past weekend, Yan’s mom became extremely worried and eventually contacted the Chinese embassy in London for help and reported her as missing to police.

Unfortunately, earlier today, Westminster police released a second statement, explaining that officers investigating Yan’s disappearance gained entry to a Westminster address at 3 am on Wednesday, finding inside the body of a deceased woman.

While formal identification has yet to take place, officers believe that the deceased is Yan Sihong and have contacted her family. The death is being treated as non-suspicious.

Meanwhile, another Chinese student studying in London, Rong Luqi, a student at Imperial College, has also been reported as missing. Rong was last seen on Sunday. That same day she sent out messages on a WeChat group, telling her friends to call the police because she had been abducted.

Both of these cases have gained widespread attention on Chinese social media, causing netizens to worry about whether the United Kingdom is really such a safe place to study.

Similar concerns were voiced last year about the United States following the disappearance of 26-year-old Chinese scholar Zhang Yingying from her campus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in June.

Late that month, police arrested a 28-year-old former graduate student of the university for Zhang’s disappearance. He faces the death penalty in a trial that has been pushed back to April 2019.

Zhang’s body still remains missing.

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