Young survivor identifies attackers after 16 ys

A 24-year-old woman in Shanghai's Baoshan district helped identify the two suspects who killed her mother and severely injured her in a robbery 16 years ago, leading to their capture, Wenhui Daily reported on Wednesday.

The woman, identified by police as Yueyue, was only 8 years old when the two suspects, brothers both surnamed Heng, broke into a grocery on the night of July 6, 1997, fatally stabbed its owner Zhang — Yueyue's mother — and had tried to strangle the girl.

In the past 16 years, the police in the Baoshan district drew portraits of the two suspects in attempts to identify and capture them but only recently received tip-offs from police in the nearby Jiangsu province.

In the preliminary investigation, Yueyue told police that she remembered one of the suspects used to drive a motorcycle to the grocery to buy cigarettes, and he would carry a boy about the same age as Yueyue on the vehicle.

Police later found that the elder brother of Heng had a son, who is about Yueyue's age, leading the police to believe that the two brothers were suspects.

In following investigations, the police organized a number of occasions to ask witnesses to identify the suspects, in which Yueyue and others recognized the two brothers among seven or eight suspects.

After interrogation, the brothers confessed to the crime. A court in Shanghai gave one of them a life sentence and gave the death penalty with a few years of reprieve to the other.