Chinese man held over killing sex slaves locked in basement

A man in China has been detained on suspicion of keeping six women as sex slaves in underground rooms for two years and killing two of them, a state-owned newspaper has reported.

The Southern Metropolis Daily said that over the past two years, Li Hao allegedly kidnapped women who worked as hostesses in karaoke bars and locked them in two small rooms he had dug beneath a rented basement in Luoyang city in Henan province.

The secret rooms were located in a residential complex away from his home, where his wife and son lived unaware of the alleged kidnappings, the report said, citing unnamed police sources.

A publicity official for the city's police department confirmed that a man named Li Hao who works for the city's technological supervision bureau had been taken into custody. The official declined to provide further details, citing an ongoing investigation.

The newspaper reported that Li was a former firefighter and it claimed he regularly raped the women and would give them food only once every two days to keep them physically weak. It described the rooms the women ate, slept and defecated in as dank and smelly.

Over time, some of the captives started competing with one another for his attention, the report said, and two of them ended up fighting. Li allegedly killed one of them with the help of another woman, the paper said.

He also allegedly killed one of the other women who was said to have been "disobedient", the report said, adding that he buried both bodies in the corner of one of the rooms.

Li only let some of the women out when he wanted them to perform sexual services for other men to earn money for him, it said. It was on one of these outings that one of the women escaped and went to the police, the report said.

Police caught him on 6 September as he tried to escape the city, it said.