The police officer, who led the investigation which led to the wrongful execution of an Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region teenager, was sentenced to 18 years in jail on Tuesday for corruption and illegal possession of firearms.
Feng Zhiming, former deputy director of the Hohhot Public Security Bureau (PSB), Inner Mongolia has been sentenced 18 years in jail and fined 1.1 million yuan ($163, 000), the intermediate people's court of Hulun Buir said on its official Sina Weibo account.
Between 2008 and 2014, when Feng was the deputy director of the Hohhot PSB, he took bribes and sought benefits for others by abusing his power; along the way making some 3.8 million by illegally buying and selling properties. The court found that 34 million yuan of Feng's wealth came from unidentified sources.
Feng was found in illegal possession of 4 guns and 549 bullets, according to the post.
The court gave Feng a relatively lenient sentence due to his confession of his crime.
Feng was penalized in February for his part in the wrongful execution of a young man for a crime he did not commit.
The man, Huugjilt, who was 18 years old at the time of his death, was declared guilty of raping and murdering a woman in a Hohhot public toilet in 1996. He was sentenced to death and was executed 61 days after the verdict was handed down.
According to a contemporary local media, after Huugjilt first reported the crime - claiming that he came across the body after accidentally wandering into the women's toilet when drunk - it took only 48 hours of police work to get Huugjilt to "confess" to the crime.
Hohhot police did not test semen found at the scene at the time, because they would have had to use a larger city's police facilities and they wanted to solve the crime quickly, a retired police officer told the Beijing News in 2014.
He added that the police also coaxed Huugjilt into confessing by falsely promising to release him if he said he committed the crime.
Zhao Zhihong, a serial killer from Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, was caught and confessed to the crime in 2005.
Huugjilt's parents have since called for their son's case to be reopened, with the help of lawyers and the media.
In February, 26 of the officials involved, including Feng, received administrative penalties including admonitions and records of demerit, among whom 11 were former police officers with the public security bureau of Hohhot, and seven were former officials with the People's Procuratorate of Hohhot.
