Man facing trial for tomb theft

A 32-year-old Zhejiang man with slight mental retardation was remanded on bail Thursday after being arrested for stealing the burial objects from a public cemetery, the Beijing Youth Daily reported Friday.

A resident surnamed Huang from Hangzhou in East China’s Zhejiang Province was surprised to see the record of her father, who died one month earlier, walking for over 2,000 steps on July 1 on her WeChat Sports, the fitness tracking feature of WeChat, which was connected with her father’s WeChat account.

Her father’s mobile phone was buried with his other daily necessities such as charger, electric shaver, towel, and toothbrush in the grave together with his ashes on June 25.

When Huang dialed her father’s phone number, the phone kept ringing but no one picked up the phone.

When Huang arrived at the cemetery the next morning, she found the burial objects of her father were all missing.

After an investigation, the local police found the suspect surnamed Chen had stolen five mobile phones and one tablet computer from the cemetery between July 2017 and July 2018.

Chen noticed that many people buried their deceased relatives’ daily necessities such as mobile phones, watches and clothes in the graves. So whenever he wanted to change a mobile phone, he visited the cemetery and searched for graves with new tombstones which indicated someone was just buried.