Police have confirmed that 121 skulls with mysterious saw marks that were found in a ravine in north-west China belonged to humans, state press reported on Wednesday.
The skulls were found in plastic bags, along with fur and other bones, in a forested riverbank on Monday last week in Gansu province’s Tianzhu Tibetan autonomous county, reports said.
The skulls had their tops missing after being cut with a saw and DNA testing by police confirmed they belonged to humans, the Beijing Youth Daily said.
How and why the skulls came to be in the ravine remains a mystery.
Police in the provincial capital of Lanzhou and forensic experts have so far ruled out medical research as the reason for the sawing of the skulls, the newspaper said.
There was also reportedly no evidence that a hard blow to the skulls was the cause of death.
Police had determined that the skulls were cut after the people had died, and the marks were recent, the newspaper said. However there was no mention of how old the skulls were.
The skulls belonged to men and women, elderly and young people. Officials at the command centre investigating the case said the likeliest explanation was that the skulls were the discarded remains of a bizarre handicraft project that only used the top of the skulls, the paper said.
However few other details were given.
Local police stations were unable to comment when contacted by Agence France-Presse.
Meanwhile, the Lanzhou Morning Post reported that two cooked human arms, believed to be those of a child, had been found at a landfill site in Lanzhou city this week.
Workers at the landfill in Lanzhou’s Chengguan district found the parts along with what appeared to be other human remains in a white plastic bag on Monday, the newspaper said.
The remains were mixed with cooking ingredients including ginger and chilli, it said. It was unclear whether the remains were those of the child.
Police estimated the victim’s age to be around five to eight, the report said. No connection was made between the landfill find and the skulls in the ravine.
In another grisly case in China this year, police in February arrested a suspected serial killer in the province of Heilongjiang who allegedly sexually assaulted, killed and dismembered at least six children. – AFP
