Jealousy Eyed In China Poison Case

A man jealous of a business rival has confessed to spiking his competitor's breakfast snacks with rat poison that killed dozens of people and made hundreds sick in eastern China, state television said on Tuesday.

Chen Zhengping told police he was driven by hatred of the owner of a thriving fast food store in Tangshan, a small industrial town in Jiangsu province, China Central Television said.

Tangshan residents were shocked to see customers at the tiny Heshengyuan Soy Milk chain store collapse, some bleeding from the mouth and ears, after eating fried dough sticks, sesame cakes and sticky rice balls there on Saturday morning.

Police seized Chen on Sunday in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, hundreds of miles from Tangshan, state television said.

"We cannot say that he was responsible for the poisoning. There could be many other suspects, as in an assassination case," said a railway police official.

It gave no further details about the man.

But Hong Kong's Beijing-backed Wen Wei Po said he was a cousin of the restaurant owner and had opened a rival but less successful business in Tangshan, just outside Nanjing city.

Chen put poison in the rival eatery's water supply and noodles hoping to give breakfast-eaters stomach trouble, it said.

When he saw people dying, Chen fled and boarded a train to Henan where he was picked up by police, it said.

Authorities have refused to release an official death toll; various reports place the number of dead between 38 and 49. The Web site of the Communist Party newspaper People's Daily, citing unidentified sources, said most were schoolchildren and two were soldiers from a nearby military installation.

The Shanghai Daily said health officials found a rat poison called Du Shu Qiang in samples of snacks at the popular fast food restaurant in Tangshan, a small industrial town on the outskirts of Nanjing.

"Examination of the samples sent from hospitals showed it contains Du Shu Qiang," it quoted an official at the Jiangsu provincial Epidemic Prevention Centre as saying.

According to an official of the Nanjing Agriculture and Forestry Bureau, the poison has been banned for sale in China since the mid-1990s, but still is widely available in rural areas from illegal producers.

The National Poison Control Center said on its Web site Du Shu Qiang was made with tetramine, which attacked the nervous system and was banned in 1991. Symptoms included dizziness, vomiting, seizures, foaming at the mouth and loss of consciousness or death.

There was no effective antidote for the poison, the Shanghai Daily said.

Communist authorities routinely suppress information about disasters and other events that might hurt the government's image or arouse public anger or anxiety.

China's cabinet and the Communist Party's Central Committee, which oversees national policy, sent police and health officials to investigate, state media said, highlighting concerns about bad publicity ahead of a leadership transition expected in November.

But in the absence of further official information, rumor is rife.

"There's been nothing in the papers the past two days," said the wife of Peng Yongqing, who runs a convenience store next to Heshengyuan. "We hear the boss is in hospital, and we have no idea where her husband is."

The woman, who declined to give her own name, was adamant the pair was happy and said she had never heard of a family dispute.

"What dispute? They've been together for so many years and are happy, how can there be any dispute?" she said. "I've never heard of any friction between them and other relatives either."

Other storekeepers around the Heshengyuan outlet told Reuters various tales about the owner — he was either dead, in the hospital, being questioned by police, or not the real owner.

But police in Tangshan have said they were holding the boss of the fast-food outlet for questioning.

Hong Kong's South China Morning Post quoted a Nanjing city government spokeswoman saying it was a clear criminal case.

He had fallen out with the store owner, it said without explaining or revealing the source of the information.

China has suffered poisoning attacks in the past blamed on business rivals or people with grudges.

In July, a noodle shop owner was arrested on charges that he poisoned customers at a rival business by putting rat poison in its soup.

That incident in the southern region of Guangxi sickened 57 people but no deaths were reported.