A Chinese man who staged his death in a car accident to claim a life insurance payout has handed himself in to authorities after his wife killed herself and their two children.
The 34-year-old man, identified in state media by the surname He, said he came up with the idea of faking his own death after falling into debt to pay for medical care for his epileptic three-year-old daughter.
His wife, Dai, was the listed beneficiary of his one million yuan (£110,000) life insurance policy.
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Crucially, however, he did not inform her of the plan. When his car was found crashed in a river on 19 September, police informed He’s family that he was presumed dead.
The deception had a tragic outcome last week, when the bodies of Dai and the couple’s two children were found in a pond near the family’s home in Loudi, Hunan province.
In a final message posted on social media platform WeChat, the 31-year-old said that she intended to “accompany” her deceased husband, and complained that her in-laws had blamed her for his death.
“I only ever wanted our family of four to be together,” she wrote.
The bodies of Dai, her four-year-old son and three-year-old daughter were recovered from the water on Thursday. A postmortem examination confirmed that they died by drowning, The Straits Times reports.
As news of the tragic deaths spread on Chinese media, He resurfaced in a video shared online in which he wept as he admitted staging his death after borrowing more than 100,000 yuan (£11,000) from online lenders. The next day, state news outlets reported that he had turned himself in to police.
“The incident has been widely talked about across Chinese social media over the past week”, the BBC reports, prompting debate about how the country deals with “financial pressures and familial issues”.
Beijing lawyer Zhang Xinnian told the state-run Global Times on Monday that “the causal relation between He's fraud and Dai's suicide will be difficult to prove in court” and that although He “will be condemned morally”, he was “unlikely to suffer criminal liability for the death of his family”.
