China executes Wang Yun, teacher who poisoned kindergarteners' porridge

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A kindergarten teacher who poisoned her students with porridge laced with toxic sodium nitrate, killing one child and injuring two dozen others, because she was mad at a co-worker has been executed in China.

Wang Yun, 40, was led to the execution ground in the Henan province city of Jiaozuo Thursday and put to death, according to a note posted outside the No. 1 Intermediate Court on Friday.

Officials did not comment on the method of Wang’s execution. Most death sentences in China are carried out with a bullet to the back of the head, but lethal injections are used in some cases.

Wang’s execution came less than two years after she was sentenced to death in the mass child poisoning case that sent shockwaves through China.

The former teacher — denounced in court as “despicable and vicious” — had appealed the verdict, but her plea for leniency had been rejected.

In March 2019, Wang bought some sodium nitrite — a highly toxic substance found in fertilizers, munitions and explosives — after being involved in a fight with a colleague related to “student management.”

The next morning at Mengmeng Kindergarten, she sprinkled some of the chemical compound into the children’s “eight treasures porridge”, the court found, according to state media.

“Eight treasures porridge” is a sweet rice-based porridge, which is popular in China.

The nitrate-spiked breakfast food sickened 25 children, causing some to faint and be violently sick.

“The kids said the porridge tasted salty,” one parent told the Beijing News, according to a contemporaneous Global Times report.

Most of the youngsters suffered minor injuries and later recovered, but one student died in January 2020 from multiple organ failure, after undergoing medical treatment for 10 months.

Wang, a high-school dropout, had poisoned her husband with the same substance added to a beverage after an argument in 2017. He survived with mild injuries.

While her motive was presented as revenge, it wasn’t clear if she had meant to kill or merely sicken her husband and the roomful of innocent kindergartners.

She was initially sentenced to just nine months in prison for deliberate harm, but the sentence was later upgraded to death.

China is believed to execute thousands of prisoners each year — more than the rest of the world combined — according to estimates by Amnesty International, although the actual figure is a state secret.

With Post wires