Six Chinese men imprisoned after each outsourced the same hit job

Six men in China have been sentenced to prison for attempted murder after they all tried to pass on a hit job they were reluctant to carry out in person.

Real estate businessman Qin Youhui began the saga in 2013 when he hired a contract killer to take out a rival, Mr Wei, who was suing him.

But that hit man instead pocketed half of the two million yuan (£218,000) Mr Qin paid out and passed the gig to another person.

The assassination was then contracted out an additional three times until a fifth man entered the picture, Ling Xinsi. By then, it was April 2014, and the original pot of job money had dwindled – he was offered just 100,000 yuan (£10,900) to carry out the killing.

Mr Ling decided it simply wasn’t enough.

So he sent a note to the target, Mr Wei, asking to meet. The pair ended up in a coffee shop together, where Mr Ling told Mr Wei, “For just 100,000 yuan, I don’t want to kill you, but you have to cooperate with me.”

The two men staged Mr Wei’s death, sending photos of the faked murder scene along as proof the job was finished.

But in yet another twist Mr Wei later reported the entire incident to the local police in Nanning, a southern Chinese city.

Police – at first suspicious about the unconventional allegations ­– opened an investigation, finding enough evidence for prosecutors to bring the case to trial.

At first Mr Qin and the five contract killers were acquitted, which is extremely unusual in a country with a 99.9 per cent conviction rate.

Prosecutors appealed, and last week, the Nanning Intermediate People’s Court finally handed down prison sentences ranging from two years and seven months to five years, according to a court statement online, for “deliberately depriving others of their livelihood, with actions that constituted the crime of intentional homicide.”

Additional reporting by Yiyin Zhong