"Killer" freed after wife turns up alive

A Chinese man jailed and badly beaten for his wife's murder has been freed after she turned up not only alive but with another husband, domestic media have said, revealing a brutal arbitrariness to China's legal system.

She Xianglin's wife, Zhang Zaiyu, disappeared after a domestic dispute in 1994 and when a woman's body was found in a local reservoir, She was detained on suspicion of killing his wife, the China Daily said.

The body was so decomposed it could not be identified, but a local court found She, a former part-time police officer from central Hubei province, guilty of murder and sentenced him to death.

A provincial court later commuted the sentence to 15 years in prison.

She, 39, was coerced into confessing to her murder and badly beaten in prison, the China Daily said.

International human rights groups say police torture is widespread in China and that suspects are held for long periods without trial, but it is rare for a victim, or the domestic media, to go public about police brutality.

She told the Beijing News that when he was first apprehended, police took him to a remote house and interrogated him for 11 days. He was given just two bowls of rice a day, nearly no water, prevented from sleeping and threatened with death.

He said he did not remember making a confession, though the local court that ruled on his case was told he had.

Zhang resurfaced in late March in eastern Shandong province, where she had gone in 1994 and later married a local man, the China Daily said.

She said he wanted compensation for his years in jail and justice to be done.

"I want those officials involved in my conviction punished," he was quoted as saying.