The High People's Court of Northeast China's Liaoning Province on Wednesday sentenced the head of the country's most prolific tomb raiding gang to death with a two-year reprieve.
Ringleader Yao Yuzhong, from Chifeng in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, was found guilty of several offenses including tomb raiding, looting and selling stolen antiquities. His gang was highly organized, and would explore, loot and trade relics, the Chaoyang Intermediate People's Court of Liaoning said at his trial in April 2016.
Yao's lawyer, Bi Baosheng, told thepaper.cn on Wednesday that he received the judgment on Tuesday, which upheld the intermediate court's verdict.
In the verdict, 22 gang members received prison terms of varying lengths. Three gang members received life sentences. The gang's arrest was one of the biggest busts of its kind supervised by the Ministry of Public Security since 1949. It was among 12 organized gangs implicated in illegal excavations at Niuheliang, a Neolithic site in northeastern Liaoning.
Police apprehended 225 people and retrieved a total of 2,063 artifacts, the Xinhua News Agency reported. Among 32 artifacts retrieved by police, 16 were under grade-one State cultural protection.