No late recovery of justice

A RETRIAL LASTING MORE THAN THREE weeks finally acquitted a young man called Huugjilt of the rape and murder of a young woman, for which he was wrongly executed in 1996 at the age of 18. An investigation will now probe how such a terrible mistake was made and who should be held accountable for it.

For Huugjilt's mother it was unimaginably hard to get her son's name cleared. She spent nine years petitioning both the local and central authorities for a retrial, after a serial killer and rapist confessed to being the real culprit.

Another mother, whose 21-year-old son Nie Shubin was executed also for the rape and murder of a woman, still has to wait for the retrial she has been asking for over the past nine years since a serial killer and rapist confessed that he was the real culprit in 2005. The trial of the serial killer in Hebei province determined he was not the culprit, which denied Nie the possibility of a retrial.