No, 10 Prisoners Were Not Executed in Front of a Crowded Stadium
By Daniel Plafker
Ten prisoners convicted of drug and murder charges were publicly sentenced to death last Saturday in a mass stadium spectacle in the Guangdong city of Lufeng, Sina News reports. The condemned were wheeled into the sports center on the back of white pickups flanked by sunglasses-clad police officers while thousands of local residents – including children in school uniform – looked on.
Contrary to initial reporting, the death sentences were not carried out live in the stadium. After the sentence was read, the prisoners were immediately paraded out again to be executed elsewhere.
The Guardian initially stated that the men were killed publicly before an audience. The headline was modified shortly afterwards to ‘Thousands in China watch as 10 people sentenced to death in sport stadium’
The misreporting of the incident appears to have originated from a Guardian article published on December 18, which, according to a screenshot circulating online, initially said: "A court in China has sentenced 10 people to death, mostly for drug-related crimes, and then executed them in front of thousands of onlookers."
The original misleading headline and in-article information appears to have been quickly amended to reflect the true sequence of events, though cached copies of the initial title exist and have failed to escape the notice of eagle-eyed Redditors.
Lufeng, the notorious ‘meth-village’ of Shanwei, in eastern Guangdong province where the events took place, has been steadily escalating a dramatic crackdown on the local drug economy in recent years. The stadium played host to a similar public sentencing spectacle over the summer, while a massive Mission Impossible-style raid in the area three years ago, involving 3,000 police with speedboats and helicopters, yielded a three-ton seizure of crystal.
Watch footage of the incident below (VPN off):
https://v.qq.com/txp/iframe/player.html?vid=d0520o7bhj1&width=500&height=375&auto=0
[Cover image via the Paper]
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