Another Chinese defendant is sentenced to life imprisonment.

LIAOYANG, China-A court here Monday sentenced a Chinese man to death and another to life imprisonment for their roles in the gruesome slayings of a family of four in Fukuoka in June 2003.

The men came to Japan as students and fled to China after the murders.

Prosecutors said Yang Ning, 24, a former student at a private university in Fukuoka Prefecture, and Wang Liang, 22, had committed a ``malicious and cruel crime.''

However, the court decided to spare Wang's life because he surrendered to police, thereby helping to resolve the case.

Only Yang said he would appeal.

The men were charged with killing clothes merchant Shinjiro Matsumoto, 41, his wife, Chika, 40, and their son, Kai, 11, and daughter, Hina, 8, and stealing about 37,000 yen from their home on June 20, 2003.

Their bodies, handcuffed and weighted with dumbbells, were discovered in Hakata Bay later that day.

An alleged accomplice, Wei Wei, 25, was arrested in Japan and is now on trial at the Fukuoka District Court.

Japanese prosecutors will announce Feb. 1 what sentence they are seeking for the former vocational school student.

Investigators have deduced that the three, after failing to meet tuition bills, got to know each other at an Internet cafe in Fukuoka, and quickly turned to stealing with another Chinese man aged 26 who already had been convicted in Japan of robbery.

The ruling in China was the result of unusual cooperation between Japanese law enforcement authorities and those of China. The two countries do not have a mutual extradition treaty.

Yang and Wang returned to China four days after the slayings and were arrested in August 2003.

In another unusual step, the court allowed Japanese media representatives and bereaved relatives of the murdered family to attend the proceedings.

In seeking ``severe punishment,'' prosecutors said the crime had ``adversely affected Chinese students studying in Japan'' and damaged friendly relations between the two countries.

During the trial, Yang admitted he planned the robbery and murders. Wang knelt to apologize to the family's relatives in the first hearing.

The two were quoted as telling police that Yang saw Chika driving an expensive car and assumed the family was rich.

The relatives were not present to hear Monday's ruling. In Fukuoka, Chika's father, Ryoshichi Umezu, 78, was clearly frustrated with the ruling.

``I cannot report this (to the souls of the Matsumoto family) unless both of them are sentenced to death,'' he said.

Shinjiro's father, Yoshiki Matsumoto, 66, shared the frustration. ``I thought they would naturally be sentenced to death,'' he said.(IHT/Asahi: January 25,2005)