Lin Senhao, a 27-year-old medical student from China, sentenced to death for lethally poisoning his roommate.
The Shanghai Number Two Intermediate People's Court said Senhao committed homicide when he mixed the toxic chemical N-Nitrosodimethylamine (taken from a laboratory of a Shanghai hospital where he was interning) in a water dispenser at the Fudam University March 31.
According to the Shanghai Municipal People's Procuratorate, the 27-year-old victim, Huang Yang, drank the water April 1 and died April 16 from liver, kidney and lung failure, Global Times reports.
During the trial hearing last November, Senhao admitted to poisoning the water but claimed that he never meant to kill Yang. He said that poisoning Yang was an April fool's Day hoax gone wrong.
Senhao said that he was incited to do a prank after Huang decided to trick someone on April fool's Day. He only wanted to cause irritation to Huang.
The prosecutors dismissed Senhao's arguments by arguing that he was well aware of the nature of the chemical as he used it in experiments on laboratory animals. The defendant also published numerous articles about experiments with the chemical in national academic journals.
They further said that Senhao killed Huang over trivial disputes. At one instance, Yang is claimed to have called Senhao as 'stingy.'
"The defendant Lin Senhao committed intentional homicide by poisoning due to trivialities. The method was ruthless, the harm to society was great, the crime extremely serious," the court said in a statement, News Corp Australia reports.
The defendant's lawyer argued that Senhao wouldn't have committed an act of homicide due to 'trivial daily matters.' His client would have in fact used a different chemical if he had the intention to kill.
However, a judge at the Court ruled that it was a malicious act and that Senhao had deliberately murdered his roommate.
The US Environmental Protection Agency said that N-Nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) is primarily used as a research chemical and the exposure causes liver damage in humans. Senhao is claimed to have mixed minimum 30 grams, which is 10 times the fatal does for an adult man.
A similar incident occurred in 1994 when Sun Wei, a student at the Tsinghua University in Beijing allegedly poisoned his fellow classmate with thallium, a poisonous chemical used in rodent and insect poisons.
