Eyes not gouged out: autopsy

An autopsy has revealed that a 9-year-old boy who was killed on September 20 in Yuzhou, Henan Province, did not lose his eyeballs, local police told the Global Times on Thursday, denying rumors that said the boy's eyes had been gouged out when he was murdered.

The rumors around the case were reminiscent of an August attack in Shanxi Province, when a young boy's eyes were cut out, but he was left alive.

The suspect, surnamed Geng, has been put in police custody, and the autopsy showed that the boy, Liu Heng, had died of traumatic brain injury and hemorrhagic shock on September 20. The wounds on his body were left by glass bottles and scissors, police said.

Li Zhanfeng, the boy's uncle, told the Global Times that when they found the boy in the early hours of September 21 in the Zihe River, blood and cuts on his face and body could be seen, and that Liu's right eyeball was sunken, prompting suspicions it had been gouged out.

"We might not have seen it clearly at that time," Li said, after hearing the results of the autopsy.

Geng, 18, confessed that he invited Liu Heng to his home to watch cartoons, and at his home, they quarreled and he used a beer bottle and scissors to kill Liu, the Zhengzhou Evening News reported.

Geng used a bag to carry the boy, and rented a tricycle to take the boy to throw into the river at a bridge about three kilometers away from where the Liu Heng was killed.

According to Li, local police considered the nature of the killing "too cruel" to immediately inform the family of all the details.

The first forensic examinations showed that the boy had suffered more than 100 cuts, and on Tuesday, when experts from the provincial authorities checked the body again, Li heard that "there were about 47 cuts on the head."

"I could hardly believe how brutal Geng was, to do that on my son," the father Liu Haiyang told the Global Times, saying that the family is having difficulty coming to terms with the situation. "My wife has almost gone mad."

In the Shanxi incident, a 6-year-old boy's eyes were gouged out by his 41-year-old aunt and raised public speculation as the motive remained unknown after the aunt committed suicide.