Zhao Zuohai displays a 650,000-yuan check that he received Tuesday from the Intermediate People’s Court in Shangqui city. The money is compensation for Zhao spending 11 years in prison for a murder that never happened. Photo: CFP

By Fu Wen and Guo Qiang

A man who was wrongly jailed for 11 years on charges of murder has been compensated 650,000 yuan ($95,500), and two police officers who tortured a confession out of him more than a decade ago have been arrested, though a third officer remains at large, authorities in central Henan Province said Tuesday.

Zhao Zuohai, 57, was declared innocent by the Henan Higher People's Court shortly before he was released Saturday, after his alleged victim, Zhao Zhenshang, a former neighbor in Zhaolou village of Shangqiu city, turned up alive. The missing Zhao, who is now partially paralyzed, returned to the village April 30 to apply for medical insurance.

Zhao Zuohai received the State-paid compensation and allowances Tuesday morning from Song Haiping, president of the Intermediate People's Court in Shangqiu, after a ruling Wednesday.

Zhao had proposed a compensation of 1.2 million yuan to the court Tuesday, but he settled for the smaller sum the next day, according to media reports.

The State Compensation Law, which took effect in 2005, states that any compensation is calculated on the average daily salary of a State employee in the previous year. Jin Wei, director of the Supreme Court Compensation Office, said earlier that Zhao would receive about 450,000 yuan for 4,019 days of being wrongly imprisoned.

While Zhao was in jail, his wife remarried, two of his four children were adopted, and the other two ended up becoming migrant workers.

In a vivid account of his life in prison, Zhao told the Beijing News that the prison took care of him because of his age, and he was asked to be in charge of hundreds of inmates.

"I was treated well. My fellow inmates respected me and asked me to eat first because I am old," he said. "There was no longer torture."

Zhao said he planned to set up a small business - as he did before going to prison - and he looks forward to see-ing his son married.

Zhao could not be reached Tuesday.

Yu Fangxin, Zhao's brother-in-law, told the Global Times Tuesday that Zhao will be offered a new house, as his former home has since collapsed.

Yu conceded that his brother-in-law "has a bad temper," and that sentiment was shared by the alleged victim, Zhao Zhenshang, who told media after his return, "I am not remorseful. He had such a bad temper. He needed a lesson."

Zhao Zuohai had a bitter falling out in October 1997 with Zhao Zhenshang, who then disappeared and was reported missing until May 1999, when a headless body was found in a village well and Zhao Zuohai was arrested and charged with murder. The two men aren't related.

Many villagers believed that Zhao Zuohai was the killer, and he was handed a suspended death penalty in 2002, but that sentence was later commuted to 29 years in prison because of his good behavior.

Ironically, the "victim" said he fled the village because he thought he had killed Zhao Zuohai during the fight they had.

Though rare, this isn't the first such incident of someone charged with a crime he didn't commit. In 2005 a man named She Xianglin, from central Hubei Province, served 11 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of mur-dering his wife.

He was freed when his wife later returned to their hometown. She said he had been tortured into making a false confession. In 2005, the man received compensation of about 460,000 yuan ($67,385), according to a report by the Nanjing-based Modern Express.

Confession by torture

The latest incident has fueled public anger over a series of reports of torture and death while in police custody.

After his acquittal, Zhao told reporters that he had been forced to confess to murder, as he was beaten up during interrogations. "It would have been better to be dead than alive," he told the Beijing News.

He showed the reporters a scar on his forehead where police had hit him with a gun, and he was quoted as saying that the police also use a baton and firecrackers to hit his head, and forced him to drink water laced with chili peppers.

Local police, the court and prosecuting authorities are investigating the case and have promised to penalize those responsible for the wrong conviction.

Two police officers, Guo Shouhai and Zhou Minghan, have been detained on suspicion of torturing Zhao to extract a confession.

The whereabouts of the third officer, Li Deling, are still unknown.

China has taken some moves to root out confessions by torture. It published guidelines last month to identify specific acts for which police can be prosecuted.

Chen Tao, a criminal law expert with the Beijing Lawyers Association, told the Global Times that confessions are given more importance in China's legal system, and police consider confessions as achievements, which sometimes leads to them being forcibly obtained.

Liu Renwen, a criminal law expert at the China Academy of Social Sciences, said mistaken convictions are unavoidable in every country with every judicial system.

But a relatively reasonable system will reduce those numbers, he stressed.

"If the lawyers of the suspects are allowed to be present at the trials, the police are less likely to extort a confession by means of torture, and the process of the trials, if not open to the public, should be recorded by cameras for later reference," Liu told the Global Times.

Zuo Xuan and Xinhua contributed to this story