China to execute man who rammed SUV into crowd then attacked people with shovel and hammer

Yang Zanyun killed 15 people in violent rampage because he ‘wanted revenge on society’

A man who killed 15 people and injured dozens more when he ploughed a vehicle into a public square before attacking pedestrians with a hammer and a shovel, is to be executed by Chinese authorities.

Yang Zanyun was found guilty of deliberately driving his red Land Rover into the crowd of hundreds of people in the eastern city of Hengyang.

Exiting the vehicle he then started hacking at pedestrians with the hammer and shovel, killing 15 people and injuring 43.

Police said Yang had previously served time in prison and had wanted “revenge on society” when he carried out the attack in September.

He drove into a line of people dancing, some of whom were instantly killed.

Yang was sentenced to death for endangering public security with dangerous methods by the Intermediate People's Court of Hengyang.

He was also deprived of his political rights for life, the court said.

Yang has six previous convictions for crimes including assaulting a judge in 1992, drug trafficking, theft, starting a forest fire in 2006 and other crimes.

According to China’s state run news agency Xinhua, Yang is 54 years old. His father died when he was 11 and his mother died when he was 33 years old. The news agency said their reporter found him “remote and silent”, and he did not easily communicate.

He was reportedly married three times, had no children and had mounting debts at the time of the attack.

He had previously opened a restaurant, accumulated “a certain amount of wealth” through gold mining, was a keen gambler and built up an agriculture company worth 500,000 yuan (£58,000), Xinhua reported.

Police discovered he was in debt for roughly the same amount, and said he had been diagnosed with gastric cancer and suffered from heart disease.

Due to his previous convictions local police regularly checked in with him.

Officers had visited him five times in the six months before the attack and had recorded no abnormal behaviour, Xinhua reported.

Police investigations revealed on the day of the attack his illness had worsened and he felt old due to his lack of children or grandchildren.

He dropped his girlfriend off at her home before carrying out the deadly attack.

Five people including young children were killed and 18 injured in another attack in China later this year when a car ploughed into a crowd outside a primary school while children were being led across the road.

China has traditionally used firing squad as its means of execution, but has more recently favoured lethal injection.

The country has the highest rate of capital punishment in the world, but no official figures are released. A 2013 estimate by an American NGO put the figure at over 2,400 for that year alone.