Petition seeks US probe in student's poisoning
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E-mail China Daily, May 6, 2013
A petition circulating on a White House website asks that President Barack Obama's administration look into the unsolved case of a Chinese university student who was poisoned and paralyzed almost 20 years ago.
![The paralyzed Zhu Ling (second right) tries to move with the help of her parents and a housemaid. Zhu was poisoned with thallium 19 years ago when she was studying at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The case has never been solved. [Photo/China Daily]](http://images.china.cn/attachement/jpg/site1007/20130506/7427ea210acc12f1b7b901.jpg "The paralyzed Zhu Ling (second right) tries to move with the help of her parents and a housemaid. Zhu was poisoned with thallium 19 years ago when she was studying at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The case has never been solved. [Photo/China Daily]") |
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The paralyzed Zhu Ling (second right) tries to move with the help of her parents and a housemaid. Zhu was poisoned with thallium 19 years ago when she was studying at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The case has never been solved. [Photo/China Daily] |
Someone with the initials Y.Z. and a Florida address drafted the petition on Friday on the We the People section of the official WhiteHouse.gov site.
The petition, which contains misspellings including the name of the victim, asks the administration to "invest (sic) and deport Jasmine Sun who was the main suspect of a famous Thallium poison murder case (victim: Zhu Lin) in China".
More than 70,000 people had "signed" the electronic petition as of Sunday night.
Under rules revised in January by Obama's administration, any petition that gets more than 100,000 signatures in its first 30 days will receive an official response from the president's office. The administration began accepting petitions through its We the People initiative during Obama's first term.
The victim, Zhu Ling, was a third-year chemistry student at Tsinghua University in Beijing when she became ill in December 1994. Her condition soon became serious, but doctors couldn't formulate a diagnosis. By the time they determined Zhu had been poisoned with thallium, her central nervous system was already badly damaged.
Now 40, Zhu remains paralyzed and nearly blind with diminished mental capacity. She is being cared for by her parents, who are in their 70s.
The chief suspect in the poisoning was Zhu's university roommate, Jasmine Sun, who according to the petition entered the United States.
The petition is the latest twist in a case that saw Sun cleared of suspicion by Beijing police after a four-year investigation. By 1999, police said, forensic evidence from the scene had deteriorated to the point that a conviction would be impossible.
The petition quickly drew comments from people in China and Chinese expatriates. Many posted and reposted items about it on social media sites and in online forums.
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