An anonymous tip-off has exposed a 23-year-old secret and the not-so-ordinary family man behind it.
Li, second from left, photographed with police after his arrest. | The Paper
In China, a task force went on the hunt for a man, surnamed Li, after a tip-off informed him that he was not the person he had been pretending to be for decades. Li was found living as a monk in a Buddhist temple.
| The Paper
Though monks aren’t banned from marriage under China’s Marriage Law, China’s Buddhist principles dictate that monks should not marry. Police investigators discovered that Li had secretly been living with a woman and had fathered two children, a son and a daughter. This was not, however, Li’s biggest secret.
Unrelated photo for illustrative purposes | Adobe Stock
Li was, in fact, a fugitive who had killed two people in China’s Zhejiang province back in 2001. Though his accomplice was captured right after the crime, Li escaped by fleeing from his hometown in Sichuan and then picking up a stranger’s identity card. Thanks to that card–and the disguises Li wore while out in public–Li lived a fruitful life as “Liu” for 23 years, studied at a Buddhist college, became a monk, and started a family.
If not for the anonymous tip-off received in March, police might have never captured Li, who had been planning to flee again, this time to Tibet. Li was found 1,000km away from where the murders took place.
