China-Executes-Billionaire-Who-Ran-Mafia-Style-Criminal-Gang

A Chinese billionaire who was building a mining empire in Australia was executed Monday after a court last year sentenced him to die for running a “mafia-style” gang that engaged in murder and extortion.

Liu Han, 49, his brother Liu Wei, and three associates were executed on Monday, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported, citing the Xianning Intermediate People’s Court in the central Chinese province of Hubei. The men had been sentenced last May for running a criminal syndicate that killed at least eight people, ran extortion schemes, trafficked weapons and operated gambling dens.

Their crimes were “deeply evil and particularly cruel,” Xinhua cited the court as saying.

China leads the world in executions, but Liu Han’s case was particularly noteworthy because of his great wealth — with one official report pinning his family’s assets at more than $6 billion — his international business network that invested in Australian mines, as well as his reported connections to a disgraced former Chinese police czar who is awaiting trial.

Liu Han’s arrest in March 2013 came as he was in talks to buy the Australian mining company Sundance Resources. The deal collapsed the following month. In 2009, his flagship company, Sichuan Hanlong Group,bought a controlling stake in another Australian mining company, Moly Mines.

His brother, Liu Wei, was a torchbearer for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Liu Wei was convicted of ordering the killings of three people in 2009 at an open-air tea house in his hometown in Sichuan Province.

When they rounded up the gang in 2013, the police said they confiscated grenades, guns, bullets and knives. The brothers and their associates had fleets of cars including Rolls-Royces, Bentleys and Ferraris, Xinhua reported last year.

Liu Han was arrested only months after President Xi Jinping of China came to power. It was the early days of an anticorruption campaign, when Sichuan-based associates of Zhou Yongkang, the former head of China’s police and security forces, were being detained. The respected Chinese business magazine Caixin reported last year that Liu Han and Mr. Zhou’s son Zhou Bin had a business relationship.