(TibetanReview.net, Jul24’22) – The last chapter in the gruesome murder nearly two years ago of a Tibetan woman, who was a Chinese Douyin media influencer, by her estranged Chinese husband has concluded on Jul 23 with the latter’s execution by a court in Sichuan Province.
For the crime of intentional homicide, the criminal named Tang Lu was executed according to the order of the Supreme People’s Court, reported China’s official globaltimes.cn Jul 23, citing the Intermediate People’s Court of Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture.
The execution followed Tang being given the death penalty in Oct 2021. Prior to the execution, Tang was arranged to meet his family in order to protect his legitimate rights, the report said.
The report said Tang and the victim Lhamo (written in the report as Lamu) got married in 2009. During their marriage, they quarreled many times and Tang had beaten Lamu several times. After they divorced in Jun 2020, Tang repeatedly sought to restore the marriage, but was rejected by Lhamo, the report cited a previous statement of the court as saying.
On the fateful day of Sep 14, 2020, Tang went to the home of Lhamo’s father and sprayed gasoline on her as she was livestreaming in the kitchen, and set her on fire.
Lhamo died after about half a month of treatment.
The court was stated to have called the crime extremely cruel and its consequences very grave, leading to severe punishment for Tang.
Born in 1990, Lhamo had about 75,000 followers on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok run by the same parent company. She used to share her rural daily life on the platform. Her case triggered heated discussions over domestic violence at that time, the report noted.
Campaigns over Lhamo’s death intensified when the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, gave a speech to a UN conference a day later saying the protection of women’s rights and interests “must become a national commitment,” noted the AP Jul 23.
Hashtags including #LhamoAct, calling for laws allowing victims an automatic divorce, spread across the internet but were quickly shut down by censors, the report said.
The report cited Lhamo’s sister as having told an official media outlet in Shanghai, the Paper, that her sister had suffered domestic abuse at Tang’s hands for years and decided to divorce him as a result.