Telegraph: It was the day after Chinese New Year when Peng Lijuan, a 28-year-old computer science graduate, ran off to join China’s most radical cult.
“When I got home, I found our car there, and all her clothes, her ID card, all her belongings, but she was missing,” said her husband Peng Baoshun.
The couple had only been married for a year and rarely fought, said Mr Peng. Seven months later, he has not seen or heard from her since.
Shandong, their home province, is the heart of the Church of Almighty God, a cult that believes that Jesus has risen in the shape of a 40-something Chinese woman named Yang Xiangbin, also sometimes known as Lightning Deng.
Today, five members of the cult will go on trial in Yantai, a seaside city in Shandong, for murdering a 37-year-old woman in a branch of McDonald’s while she waited for her husband and seven-year-old son.
No one intervened to stop the killing, which was caught on smartphone cameras, as Zhang Lidong, an unemployed salesman, three of his children and his partner tried to enlist the woman and then bludgeoned her to death when they failed.
“She was a monster,” he later said on television. “She is an evil spirit. We are not afraid of the law. We have faith in God.”
The Church of Almighty God has said the case against its five members is “full of lies and layered with dubious facts”.
After being put on a wanted list by the Chinese police 14 years ago, Yang Xiangbin and her lover, the founder of the cult and a former physics teacher Zhao Weishan, travelled to the United States on false passports and claimed political asylum.