A 28-year-old man from the mainland killed and dismembered a 37-year-old mainland woman in a local hotel guestroom on Friday, the Macau Judiciary Police (PJ) announced at a special press conference today.
According to the press conference, the suspect was arrested in Zhongshan, a city some 60 kilometres north of Macau in Guangdong province, this morning.
A PJ spokesperson said that the suspect would go on trial in the mainland, considering that he's a mainland resident and the victim was also from the mainland.
While the suspect faces capital punishment in the mainland, in Macau the maximum punishment amounts to a prison term of 30 years.
The spokesperson said that a cleaner employed by a subcontractor of the Municipal Affairs Bureau (IAM) stumbled on body parts on a hill slope in Taipa near a facility of local power utility CEM yesterday morning. The Public Security Police (PSP) notified the Judiciary Police (Macau's criminal investigation department) about the case. PJ officers carried out a detailed search of the area where they discovered a total of 10 parts of a dismembered female body, the spokesperson said. They also found the victim's identification documents and blood-stained clothes in an area covering about 100 metres.
Follow-up investigations led the Judiciary Police to the victim's hotel guestroom where a forensic examination discovered traces of blood in the bathrooms.
Further investigations showed that the suspect had entered Macau on June 5 and returned to the Chinese mainland via the Barrier Gate checkpoint yesterday afternoon.
The investigations also showed that the suspect travelled between the hotel in the nearby Cotai Strip and Taipa by taxi several times between Friday night and early yesterday. According to CCTV footage, each time the suspect carried luggage that appeared to be heavy up to the hill slope.
Thanks to immediate cross-border police cooperation the suspect was arrested in Zhonghan this morning. The spokesperson said that when questioned about the case by the mainland's Public Security Bureau (PSB), the suspect confessed to killing and dismembering the victim.
During today's press conference, the police showed the murder weapons to the media - four knives and a pair of scissors retrieved from a rubbish bin in Taipa.
The spokesperson did not elaborate on the possible motive for the crime, citing the ongoing cross-border investigations into the case.
Murder cases have been rare in the city since the establishment of the Macau Special Administrative Region (MSAR) in December 1999.
