A man was executed in east China's Zhejiang Province on Thursday for murder, rape and burglary.

Twenty-nine-year-old Dong Wenyu was sentenced to death in June by the intermediate people's court in Jinhua city, Zhejiang Province, for killing six people, injuring two others and raping several women in five burglaries, in which he stole 1,600 yuan (213.3 U.S. dollars), between March and May last year in eastern Zhejiang, Jiangxi and Fujian provinces.

The unemployed man was also found to have broken into houses in Jiangxi, Zhejiang and Sichuan, stealing money and other items valued at 8,600 yuan (about 1146.7 U.S. dollars) from November 2004 to November 2006.

Dong didn't appeal to the higher court and the sentence was approved by China's Supreme People's Court.

The court confirmed that Dong broke into his victims' houses in the middle of the night while the house owners were asleep to steal money or valuable items. If the owners were woken up by the noise he would kill them, mostly by cutting their throats.

He raped several women and sometimes he even had sex with the bodies of women he had killed.

China's Ministry of Public Security issued an arrest order for Dong on July 19, 2006.

Dong was arrested in the early hours of Nov. 16 last year when attempting to steal a cell phone from a second-floor apartment in the Xiangbi Township of southwestern Sichuan Province. The owner woke up and cried out. Dong jumped out of a window and broke his right leg, before being recognized by local police.

Dong's parents divorced and he left home at the age of 11. He had previous convictions of willful and malicious injury and theft, and had served previous jail terms of 18 months and two and a half years.

(Xinhua News Agency November 30, 2007)