GUANGZHOU: Police have detained a young man and a woman suspected of dismembering a man and sending his body parts to three different cities by post.

The man is an employee of a local logistics company, while the woman is a prostitute, according to the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis News.

"The case is thought to involve a murder for love," the newspaper quoted a police source as saying yesterday.

The victim was a 50-year-old man who had once visited the prostitute, the newspaper said.

The young man is believed to have fallen in love with the prostitute. The two then allegedly conspired to kill the oldder man because he had met with the prostitute, according to the Southern Metropolis News.

After dismembering the man's body, the two allegedly put the parts into three cardboard boxes, which they then sent to three different cities.

The murder came to light on January 7 after staff at a logistics company in Qingdao, East China's Shandong Province, noticed blood seeping out of one of the boxes. The box was meant to be carrying medicine.

Qingdao police opened the box, which was 60-70 centimeters long and 30-40 centimeters wide, and found a human torso but no head, arms or legs. The box had been sent from Guangzhou.

Meanwhile, police in Beijing and Jiangyin, in East China's Jiangsu Province, found a man's head and arms on January 9. Police said they believed the parts belonged to the same man.

Qingdao immediately sent five police officers, led by a deputy bureau chief, to Guangzhou to help investigate the case. Guangzhou police set up a special task force to handle the case after learning that body parts had turned up in other cities.

Footage taken by closed-circuit television at a Guangzhou shipping company showed that a man and a woman had sent the packages.

The footage showed that the two had arrived by taxi at a cargo transport terminal on Guangzhou's Shatai Road at about 6:30 pm on January 4 to ship three boxes by truck. The boxes had been labelled as medicine and machine fittings.

The man signed for the packages using the apparent pseudonym Song Deyuan, which translates as "sent far away".

The logistics company did not inspect the boxes before sending them on to their destinations, the paper reported.

Officials from the company refused to comment on the case yesterday.