‘Every night, I can’t sleep well’: body-under-the-bed guest at Tibet’s Guzang Shuhua Inn demands answers
- After a traveller surnamed Sun found an unbearable smell in his hotel room in Lhasa, police told him they had discovered a corpse under the bed he had just slept on
- Sun tells the Post, ‘This has affected my life and work’. He says the hotel has kept silent since his story went viral, and threatens to take legal action
When a post a traveller left on a Chinese hotel review website on April 21 that a body had been found under the bed he had slept on at a hotel in Lhasa, Tibet, went viral last week, hotel staff told a local online news service it was “false information”.
On Monday, a day after they spoke to Hongxing News, their story fell apart when another online news service posted on Weibo, mainland China’s equivalent of Twitter, a 50-second clip of the dramatic arrest of a man on a train.
Police later confirmed the arrest, on April 21 on a train bound from Tibet to Lanzhou in northwest China, was of a suspect linked to the discovery of a corpse at the Lhasa hotel, the Guzang Shuhua Inn.
Hongxing News’ Sunday report also quoted staff of the hotel as saying it had shut for renovation, not because of an alleged murder, and quoted a police station near the hotel – the Lhasa Chengguan District Bureau of Public Security Jiri Police Station – as backing up their claim about its closure for upgrading.
The same day, Shangyou News quoted the traveller, a 37-year-old from Shanghai who it identified by a pseudonym, Zhang, as saying he noticed a “strong” smell when he checked into his room at the Guzang Shuhua Inn on April 21. He recalled he didn’t think too much of it at first and wondered if his feet were the problem.
