Helpless webcam witness watches in horror as girlfriend is murdered

by Steven Mostyn - Apr 20 2011, 06:36

Distraught and powerless to intervene, a man in China has been forced to watch helplessly via a live webcam link as his girlfriend was attacked and murdered some 6,600 miles away.

The brutal attack unfolded in Toronto, Canada, early on Friday morning as 23-year-old English Language student Qian Liu was chatting online with her boyfriend back in China via her notebook computer.

According to the boyfriend’s eyewitness account, there was a pause in the conversation at around 01:00 when Miss Liu answered a knock at the door, whereupon she was met by a male who proceeded to ask if he could use her mobile phone.

Local police authorities report that the assailant, who was not known to the watching boyfriend, then became involved in a violent tussle with his victim, some of which took place beyond the webcam’s vision. The webcam was turned off soon thereafter.

“The online witness became concerned and contacted several people known to the deceased here in Canada, and appealed to them to go and track down her welfare,” commented Detective Sergeant Frank Skubic from the Toronto Police Department.

However, when the police were eventually alerted, they arrived on the scene to find the girl had been murdered and left semi-naked on the floor. Her mobile phone and IBM ThinkPad T400 notebook computer were also missing from the room.

The police are said to be looking for a muscular man in his 20s, who’s around 6ft tall and has medium-length brown hair.

According to some of Miss Liu’s friends, she probably knew the attacker as his description matches that of a man who had once shared the same student house and had been chasing her affections for some time.

An initial autopsy has failed to return a conclusive cause of death, which has led to speculation that the attacker administered a fatal injection—a viewpoint likely fuelled by the investigation’s current lack of toxicology results.

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