China: Wife Boils Husband's Corpse in Pressure Cooker

A woman in Lu'an City, China, is believed to have killed her husband and boiled his dismembered body parts in a pressure cooker.

The husband was apparently drugged and tortured for three days in June by the woman, who withheld food and water, as well as beating him savagely, according to Anhui News.

In her defence, the woman claimed that she and her daughter had been abused by the spouse.

They dismembered his body with a saw, and she then boiled his body parts in a pressure cooker to cover her tracks, said the report.

How she disposed of the cooked flesh remains unclear.

The woman then turned herself in to police because of the psychological stress caused by committing the crime, having lost more than 6kg in weight.

Misogyny among men in China is often highlighted as a worrying trend by many Chinese observers and critics.

Boy babies are much preferred to females, with devastating consequences. By 2020, it's estimated that 30 million men of marriageable age will be unable to find a wife.

The trade in women as wives is common in rural China and a woman may be sold several times by intermediaries before meeting her eventual husband.

In a recent human trafficking case, four people were sentenced for selling 11 young Vietnamese women to China as wives for Chinese men.

There have also been reports of a group of gangsters arrested for killing women to sell the bodies as "ghost brides" for dead bachelors.

Ghost weddings take place when a young adult son dies before he is married. The belief is that a ghost bride will keep him company in the afterlife, protecting his family from misfortune.