Police in Northeast China's Jilin Province Wednesday showed the body of a 2-month-old baby, who was allegedly killed by a car thief, to his parents and vowed to severely punish the thief in accordance with the law.

The tragic incident in Changchun, the capital of Jilin, has triggered outrage among the public, who demanded the death penalty for the killer and reflected on the cause of the incident.

The Department of Public Security of Jilin Province Wednesday said on its official Sina Weibo account that it has identified Zhou Xijun, 49, as the suspect in the strangling of Xu Haobo, who was on the back seat of a car stolen by Zhou.

After allegedly burying the child in snow and abandoning the stolen car on Monday morning, Zhou turned himself in on Tuesday after the police launched a manhunt and many of the city's cab drivers voluntarily joined the search for the stolen car.

Dozens of Changchun residents Tuesday night rushed to a police station, where Zhou was held in detention, crowding the hall of the station and demanding to see Zhou. Some of them expressed their anger, and demanded he be severely punished.

The call was echoed by Web users, with an overwhelming majority of them calling for the death penalty. They even carried out a human flesh search for Zhou, and posted his picture online.

Liu Tao, a law professor with the People's Public Security University of China, told the Global Times that Zhou is most likely to get the death penalty, noting that the law only stipulated that a confession "might" lead to a more lenient sentence.

Liu added that the courts should learn lessons from past experience, in which they had to hand out a harsher punishment due to public backlash against the original sentence.

In 2011, Li Changkui, who killed a 3-year-old boy and his teenage sister after raping her, finally received the death penalty, after a court in Yunnan Province overruled its prior sentence of a death penalty with a two-year reprieve.

The incident has taken attention away from the ongoing sessions of China's top legislature and political advisory body. While condemning the cold-blooded killer, the public also questioned what had caused the man to show such little mercy to a baby.

Some Web users said that the incident was reflective of maladies facing the entire society, calling it a projection of society's contempt for human life and dignity.

A February New York Post report began circulating online, which said a thief called the New York City Police Department after finding a baby in a car he had stolen and reported the location, triggering further public outrage over the Changchun case.

Yuan Yulai, a lawyer in Zhejiang Province and active microblogger who has over half a million followers on Sina Weibo, told the Global Times that the government's practice of obsessing over GDP figures and ignoring people's needs is to blame for the moral bankruptcy in society.

"The various practices of forced demolition and forced abortion reflect a lack of respect for people's lives and dignity, which made society imitate bad examples. It's a lack of faith in people, and the contempt of people has become a culture," Yuan said.

However, Zhou Xiaozheng, a professor of sociology at the Renmin University of China, disagreed with this conclusion, noting that there is no solid proof to back it given the tragedy is only an isolated case.

On the sidelines of the ongoing Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) session, Ge Jianxiong, director of the library of Fudan University and a CPPCC member, said that while it is a chilling incident, it doesn't represent all of society.

"Blaming society and other people for the fault of an individual is the beginning of society sinking and walking toward failure," warned Zhu Xuedong, editor-in-chief of the China Weekly, on his Weibo.

In fact, despite the tragic ending of the case, many people in Changchun showed their compassion during this case. While some voluntarily joined the hunt for the baby, others gathered and lit candles to mourn the death of the baby after hearing the bad news.

Some people also questioned whether the parents of the baby should be punished.

The baby's father left the baby in the car for around 10 minutes with the engine running while he went into his store and found the car had been stolen.

Some people believed that he should also be punished, and called for the enacting of related laws to punish irresponsible parents.

However, both Yuan and Liu believed it's immature for China to legislate such a law, and impropriate to criticize the father at this time.

"What's more important is to raise the awareness of parents through the promotion of safety precautions in the country to prevent similar cases from happening," said Liu.

Liu Linlin contributed to this story

Read more in Daily Specials: Missing infant killed by car thief in Changchun