Shajian Village, located in Shuozhou City, Shanxi Province, about 10 kilometers north of Shuozhou City, is a medium-sized village with more than 700 people. Most of the villagers make a living by farming and working in nearby coal mines, and it is a well-known wealthy village in the area.
The rhythm of life for the villagers of Shajian Village follows the farming seasons and the shifts at the mines. In such a closed North China village where the villagers are all related to one another by kinship, interpersonal relationships are extremely tight, and a family’s life is almost completely exposed to the scrutiny of an acquaintance society, with almost no personal privacy to speak of.
Liu Zhanjin, a 34-year-old villager at the time, lived in this environment where there was almost no space for personal privacy. Liu Zhanjin was withdrawn and introverted by nature, almost never taking the initiative to communicate with others, and was a typical marginal figure in the village.
In his early years, Liu Zhanjin married his wife through the traditional rural matchmaking method. The two had no emotional foundation before marriage, and conflicts soon emerged after marriage.
Liu Zhanjin’s wife maintained ambiguous relationships with multiple men from other villages, and within one year of marriage she twice abandoned the family and ran away from home. In a conservative village, these matters were open secrets and quickly became the talk of the entire village.
What was even harder for Liu Zhanjin to bear was that, as his son gradually grew up, because the child did not look like Liu Zhanjin, the villagers began to openly discuss that the child was not his; even when they met him face to face, the villagers would ask him in a mocking tone whose child this really was.
His wife’s betrayal and the mockery of the whole village combined to form a long-term psychological oppression on Liu Zhanjin.
Liu Zhanjin did not handle the problems in his marriage through any normal channels, nor did he leave the village. Instead, he buried all his humiliation and anger deep in his heart. He became increasingly sensitive and suspicious, and he repeatedly threatened in the village: “If I ever unleash my wrath, it will be worse than the Greater Khingan Range fire.” At the time, no one took this harsh threat seriously, treating it merely as the verbal venting of an honest man pushed to his limit.
On March 11, 1999, Liu Zhanjin’s psychological defenses completely collapsed. In the enclosed courtyard of his home, he killed his wife and his 6-year-old son, then dug a deep pit under the toilet in the corner of the yard and buried the two bodies. After doing all this, he calmly told the villagers that his wife was incorrigible and had run off with a man from another village, taking their son with her. Because his wife had already run away from home twice before, the villagers believed this without doubt.
Liu Zhanjin also had two daughters. After the death of his wife and son, the two daughters continued to live with him, while beneath the earthen pit in their own courtyard were buried his wife and son.
After that, Liu Zhanjin almost stopped going out to do farm work, locking himself at home all day, and the last weak connection he had with the outside world was completely severed.
From March 1999 to March 2000, for nearly a year, Liu Zhanjin hardly left his home, turning his courtyard into a secret bomb-making workshop.
Liu Zhanjin had once worked as a blaster at the village-run coal mine in his early years and had a thorough knowledge of the detonation principles of explosives, charge calculations, and detonator wiring techniques. He knew that purchasing detonators and explosives through official channels would expose his plan, so he used the underground sales channels he had learned during his time working at the coal mine to secretly buy explosives in small batches over time. To maximize the destructive power, he searched everywhere for discarded pig iron pots and smashed them with a heavy hammer into sharp iron fragments. He also found large quantities of threaded steel rebar used in construction and sawed them section by section with a hacksaw into steel segments several centimeters long. He mixed these metal fragments with extremely strong penetrating power thoroughly with the explosives and assembled two huge improvised explosive devices. Later calculations estimated that the total weight of these two handmade bombs reached 40 to 50 kilograms. He placed the two bombs on a wooden flatbed cart, the most common kind in rural areas, and covered them with a thick layer of corn as camouflage.
About 20 days before the incident, he also took advantage of the night to conduct a small-scale experimental explosion in the fields outside the village.
Once everything was ready, he began patiently waiting for the moment when the whole village would gather.
On the morning of March 29, 2000, a family surnamed Liu in Shajian Village held a wedding. According to local traditional marriage customs, the wedding site would become the village’s temporary social center, and men, women, old and young would all come to give gifts, attend the banquet, and watch the bridal procession.
That morning, the busiest main road in the center of the village was crowded with villagers offering congratulations, and both sides of the street were bustling with the voices of more than a hundred men, women, old and young gathered on the narrow village road.
Liu Zhanjin went to the village school three times to tell his two daughters not to go home at noon, to eat at their grandmother’s house, and not to go out to watch the wedding scene.
At around 10:15 a.m., Liu Zhanjin pushed the flatbed cart covered with corn and slowly walked out of his courtyard, heading step by step along the village road toward the center of the wedding scene.
Liu Zhanjin usually had an extremely low presence in the village and always avoided people when walking, and the flatbed cart was covered with a thick layer of corn, so his appearance did not arouse anyone’s vigilance. No one knew that the cart carried the two handmade bombs he had spent a year making. He pushed the cart to a stop in the exact center of the densest crowd, without any extra movement and without uttering a shout or warning, and directly lit the fuse.
With a huge boom, 40 to 50 kilograms of mixed explosives detonated instantly, creating a massive shock wave that swept outward radially in all directions, carrying thousands of steel segments and iron fragments flying indiscriminately. The area within dozens of meters was instantly leveled. Surrounding houses collapsed over a large area. Liu Zhanjin, at the core of the explosion, died on the spot. Twenty-five people died at the scene, and dozens more lay wounded in pools of blood.
After the explosion, the Shuozhou municipal government quickly established a working group and mobilized medical and security forces to rush to Shajian Village. Rescue workers split into two groups: one transported the injured and comforted the families, while the other sealed off the scene and began investigation. More than 50 injured people were sent to hospitals for emergency treatment, but because the explosives had been mixed with large amounts of iron fragments, many later died of severe injuries. In the end, it was confirmed that the explosion caused a total of 39 deaths and more than 50 injuries. A red happy occasion turned into a white funeral in a matter of seconds. After police intervened, they quickly sealed off the scene and launched an in-depth investigation into the source of the explosion and the suspect.
When criminal investigators searched Liu Zhanjin’s residence, they found a note in the house that read: “Open the box and the truth will be revealed.” The investigators pried open the old wooden box in the house and retrieved the suicide note Liu Zhanjin had left behind before his death.
In the suicide note, Liu Zhanjin detailed the resentment he had developed from being mocked by the villagers over a long period, the process of making bombs to take revenge on the whole village, and clearly confessed to the fact that he had killed his wife and son on March 11, 1999, precisely indicating the burial location.
Based on the specific location provided in the suicide note, the police carried out excavation beneath the toilet in Liu Zhanjin’s courtyard, and two sets of skeletal remains emerged. They were confirmed to be those of Liu Zhanjin’s wife and son, who had been missing for more than a year.
In view of the fact that the criminal suspect Liu Zhanjin had already died on the spot at the explosion scene, the public security organ, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Criminal Procedure Law, lawfully terminated the investigation into Liu Zhanjin’s suspected intentional homicide and explosion crimes and no longer pursued his criminal responsibility.