Man who robbed official of 1.3m yuan sentenced to 14 years in prison

A man charged of robbing 1.3 million yuan ($203,000) from the home of a senior official and his wife armed with an air pistol was sentenced to 14 years in prison and fined 100,000 yuan, thepaper.cn reported on Thursday. The money was recovered and returned.

On April 28, 2015, Ma Jian and an accomplice surnamed Xie robbed the home of Shi Ping, who is now head of Anhui Province’s traffic department according to the department’s official website, taking 830,700 yuan and $28,980 and shopping cards and bank cards that were valued at more than 280,000 yuan.

After the case went viral online, the sheer amount of cash involved in the robbery caused many Chinese netizens to question if Shi was corrupt.

When contacted by thepaper.cn on Wednesday, Shi said that the discipline inspection commission had already conducted an investigation.

He declined to comment further.

In his testimony, Ma said he began planning the robbery after he read news reports about robberies in 2014 involving government officials, some of whom chose not to call police to avoid questions concerning the origins of their wealth.

Ma snuck into Shi’s housing community on several occasions to gather information.

After the robbery, Ma fled to Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province, but Xie was arrested the next day.

Ma was arrested on October 28, 2017 in Jiujiang.