A man in northwest China has been charged with murdering two mentally disabled women and trying to sell their corpses as "ghost brides" in a neighbouring province, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
In many parts of especially northern China, relatives of a man who dies a bachelor will practice the 3,000-year-old rural folk custom called minghun, searching for a dead woman and burying the two together as a married couple.
The suspect is surnamed Ma, while two other men, Yang and An, have been charged as his accomplices. The three were driving from Gansu province when they were stopped by traffic police in Wuqi, in Shaanxi on April 13th. They had the body of a woman with the family name An in the car and said they were bringing her for a ghost marriage.
Mr Ma initially told the officers that the woman was his relative, but the real identity of the woman was revealed during a subsequent investigation, Xinhua reported.
Two of the men had earlier posed as matchmakers in Ms An’s home village, promising her family that they would find her a husband. They then injected her with powerful sedatives, killing her and brought her back to Gansu.
In February, Mr Ma was suspected of killing a woman, surnamed Liu, in the same way, Xinhua reported.
The “ghost wedding” ceremony is a combination of a wedding and a funeral, and the dead woman is supposed to care for the man in the afterlife. There is a strong belief in these rural communities that misfortune will befall a family if a son is buried unmarried, and a ghost wedding ensures good fortune is restored.
Mr Ma hired Mr Yang to drive Ms Liu’s body to Yulin county in Shaanxi, where they sold the body to a local village for a ghost marriage for 35,000 yuan (€4,644).
Mr Ma has been charged with kidnapping, human trafficking and murder, while Mr An is charged with abduction and trafficking and Mr Yang is charged with obstruction, police in Wuqi told local media.
The market for brides is competitive, and there are regular reports of grave robbing. Hongtong county in the south of Shaanxi has reported at least three dozen thefts of female corpses in the last three years, police officer Lin Xu told Xinhua in February.
