CHINESE NEWS OUTLETS PLAY DOWN KILLINGS OF 19 PEOPLE

HONG KONG: In a remote Chinese mountain village, 19 bodies were found. Among the dead was a three-year-old. Hours later, a young man was arrested in connection with the killings.

Had this crime, discovered on Thursday morning, occurred in the United States, it would have ranked as one of the most horrific mass murders in the nation’s history, worse than the killings last year in San Bernardino, California, where 14 people died, and the 2012 shootings at a cinema in Aurora, Colorado, which killed 12.

But in China, the country’s censors have been hard at work taking down posts about the killings on social media that deviate from the terse, five-sentence account released on Thursday afternoon by Xinhua, the official news agency, and dutifully reproduced in print and on the internet across the country.

Although Yang Qingpei, 27, was arrested in relation to the killings in the village of Yema, little was publicly known on Friday, 36 hours after the bodies were discovered, about what happened. The police arrested Mr Yang on Thursday afternoon in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, more than 100 miles south of Yema, Xinhua reported.

The Beijing News was one of the few news outlets to go beyond Xinhua’s account, reporting that Mr Yang was a native of the village and that the police did not suspect the killings to be a case of terrorism. No official reports indicated any possible motive, and there was no indication what weapon Yang is accused of using, though in China it is far more common to commit homicide with a knife than with a gun.

It was also not clear when the killings took place. Xinhua reported that the police received calls around 7.50am on Thursday. But The Beijing News referred to a document listing the names of the dead from the “9/28 incident”, suggesting they might have occurred the day before.

One paper in western China, The Chengdu Economic Daily, citing a classmate of Mr Yang’s, reported that he had racked up large gambling debts while working in Kunming. He had asked his family in Yema for money, but his request had been rejected. The report was subsequently taken down but remained cached on Google.

Only on Friday evening did Xinhua provide more detail, confirming the Chengdu paper’s account. In a five-sentence report, it said police, working for 33 hours, had solved the case. Mr Yang, who worked in Kunming, had returned home and asked his parents for money. He had an argument with them and killed them on Wednesday evening, Xinhua reported. Later, in an effort to conceal his crime, he killed another 17 people. On Thursday, after being arrested in Kunming, he confessed.

The list of the victims reported by The Beijing News included 10 who were surnamed Yang.

Interviews with residents of the area appeared to corroborate these reports. In Daibu township, a sprawling mountainous locale that encompasses Yema, the killings were the main topic of conversation at the markets, residents said.

One, a hotel owner surnamed He, said that at first people suspected the crime was a terrorist attack, echoing the killings in Kunming in 2014 by militants from Xinjiang that left 29 people dead. Then, people learned that the suspect in the killing was from the area, socially awkward and liked to gamble, he said.