A fugitive being sought by Chinese police over the blasts in the northern city of Shijiazhuang, which left at least 108 dead, had family links to all four targets, an official Chinese paper said yesterday.
But while police say Mr Jin Ruchao (41) was the only suspect some officials and foreign experts openly rejected the theory one man could carry out such a sophisticated set of attacks. The co-ordinated explosions before dawn on Friday all involved workers' accommodation blocks and one blast flattened a five-storey block attached to city cotton mill.
The Huaxi Dushi Daily quoted police sources as saying that Mr Jin as well as his father and stepmother lived in the crushed residence, where a majority of the 170 residents are believed to have died.
The paper said Mr Jin's exwife and current husband lived in one of the other buildings involved while a third target housed his former wife's parents. The fourth target was the former home of his mother, said the paper. The newspaper from the city of Chengdu said Mr Jin's ex-wife divorced him after he abused her and that he had a vengeful attitude.
Police in Shijiazhuang said Mr Jin was the main suspect and have put out wanted posters offering a reward of 50,000 yuan ($6,000) for information about the deaf man.
China says the blasts in the city some 200 km (120 miles) south-west of Beijing killed 108 people, although both local officials and hospital sources have put the death toll much higher.
The official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported yesterday that 15 of the 38 people it said were injured had been released from hospital. Police refused to comment on allegations by the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy that Mr Jin knew nothing about explosives and that a gang of up to eight suspects was being hunted. Police have forbidden survivors and their relatives from speaking to reporters.
A city government official said suspicion fell on workers made redundant from cotton mills which account for 60 to 70 per cent of the workforce in the city of 1.3 million. More than 50,000 workers had been put on "indefinite leave" since the mid-1990s.