Water monitoring results were falsified, inspectors discover

The country's top environmental authority has dispatched an inspection team to Zhuzhou, Hunan province, to look into suspected fake data at an automatic water monitoring station.

According to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the monitoring sensors at the station had been placed in bottles of drinking water rather in the Lujiang River, which the sensors were supposed to monitor.

"Based on what we've seen on the monitoring site, we have reason to suspect that the station was falsifying data," inspector Zhou Changhai was quoted as saying by China Central Television.