Fri, July 03, 2009
BEIJING, July 2 - Police have identified the man who started a blaze on board a bus in southwest China that killed 27 passengers and left 74 injured last month, state media reported Thursday.
Xinhua news agency quoted police in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, saying that they had identified the arsonist as an unemployed 62-year-old man named Zhang Yunliang, a native of Suzhou city, in eastern Jiangsu province.
Police said that Zhang had threatened to commit suicide after his family had reduced his financial support, Xinhua reported.
A few days after the June 5 blaze on a commuter bus in Chengdu police said they had established that someone had brought petrol onto the bus, and asked for the public's help in establishing the person's identity.
"Because so many people were moving around in the bus during the fire, the investigation of the scene has been difficult," investigator He Jiansheng told a press conference at the time.
"So far it has not been possible to identify who carried the petrol on board," he said.
Most of the victims were trapped inside the vehicle as the doors failed to open and all of the windows on the air-conditioned bus were shut except for those in the rear.
Passengers recalled smelling petrol and seeing a liquid on the floor of the bus before it burst into flames in a huge explosion, Chongqing Evening News reported three days after the blaze.
The mother of another witness who was at the rear of the bus said her son saw a man dump a bottle of liquid on the floor and then immediately jump out of a rear window when the bus burst into flames, the paper said.
(Agencies)
