The ruling Chinese Communist Party's powerful propaganda department has moved to quash online reports of a woman in the remote western province of Gansu who murdered her own children before committing suicide in one of the country's poorest rural communities.
"Regarding the incident of Yang Gailan, the Gansu woman who killed her children, websites must not issue public comments," editors of China's tightly controlled media organizations were warned in a recent directive leaked to China Digital Times (CDT).
"Find and delete any unauthorized or independent reports, and eliminate any politically harmful content or commentary," the order, dated Sept. 13, said in a translation provided by CDT.
Local journalists told RFA that local authorities had refused to investigate the deaths of Yang Gailan, her four children and her husband Li Keying in a suspected murder-suicide case that has rocked social media.
According to local journalist Zhang Weijun, three children under six were given pesticides by Yang Gailan, their mother, on Aug. 24, while a fourth was allegedly beaten to death by Yang, because she refused to drink the pesticide. She died despite attempts to save her at a hospital.
Yang then took pesticide herself, dying in the ambulance despite medics’ attempts to save her, Zhang said.
Husband commits suicide
Yang's husband Li Keying then killed himself on Aug. 27 after arriving at his home in Jinggu township in Gansu's Kangle county to find all of his immediately family already dead.
Li was later found dead, also believed to have committed suicide by drinking pesticide, in woods not far from his home, Zhang said via his social media account.
Police concluded that all six deaths were suicides caused by drinking pesticides, and declined to investigate further, his tweets said.
Zhang said the local authorities had imposed an information blackout on the case.
"I don't think they will give interviews, but ... you can call the Kangle county incident room and ask them," he told RFA, before supplying the number.
An employee who answered the phone at the incident room declined to comment, however.
"We don't know about that here," the employee said. "It's not our case."
Li Keying's cousin Li Keyi gave only a brief interview when contacted recently by RFA.
"The results of the police forensic tests haven't come out yet, so I'll wait for them," he said, admitting that the police had pushed him to the ground. "But I hope you [journalists] will follow the results of the investigation," he added.
Killings are symptomatic
Internet users have seen the killings as symptomatic of official corruption and grinding poverty that remains in parts of rural China.
Many have spoken out against a sense of hopelessness expressed in Yang's desperate actions, blaming the routine mistreatment of the most vulnerable in Chinese society.
"The police have prevaricated, giving various excuses, and haven't responded to public opinion," Zhang told RFA.
"So the public now wants to know even more what the truth is," he said.
He said Li Keyi had been subjected to lengthy police interrogations.
"He was pretty frightened, probably terrified," Zhang said. "He asked me to delete any reports that I had written about this story."
According to Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper, Yang's family was only able to eke out a meager living, depending on crops of peas, wheat and canola as well as a handful of livestock for their survival.
Local officials withdrew poverty relief funding from the family in 2014, saying they earned too much to qualify, it said.
Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.