ROME – Chinese couple Zhang Dayong, 52, and Gong Xiaoqing, 38, were shot and killed shortly after returning to their apartment block at via Prenestina 70 near Pigneto, in a suspected Chinese mafia gangland killing, according to the police. 

 The couple had returned to their apartment block by bicycle around 11 p.m. Monday night and shortly after getting off, the killer, who had been lying in wait inside the entrance hall shot them 6 times in the back of the head and neck just outside the door, killing them instantly. Inside their apartment, which was being rented to them by a fellow Chinese national, the carabinieri found both of their passports and while no potential motive is being ruled out, due to the precision of the attack, investigators believe that this was likely a settling of scores. This hypothesis was also supported by the fact that Sg. Dayong was allegedly involved in the criminal infiltration of the textile district in the Tuscan city of Prato, according to an investigation by the local prosecutor’s office. 

 The investigation file could be passed into the hands of the Capitoline District Anti-Mafia Investigation office, as it may have been in connection to the so-called “War of the Crutches”, in which an element of the Chinese mafia, worth over 100 milion, has escalated violence recently in Tuscany and across southern Europe, according to a report by Fatto Quotidiano. 

 According to the accounts of some witnesses, the killer, who was wearing a hood, had rung the intercoms of several apartments to have them open the doors and then had gone up to the floor where the two lived just a few minutes before descending to commit the crime. It is not clear whether the suspect, who used a small calibre pistol, left after the murders on a motorbike or on foot. According to an initial reconstruction by investigators, coordinated by prosecutor Stefano Opilio, the couple was returning home from their business: this element had initially led to the hypothesis of a robbery gone wrong, but the woman's bag and the cell phones of both were found at the crime scene, indicating that the motive was likely not a robbery. 

 These were not the only suspected Chinese mafia killings in the area, as in 2012, on via Alò Giovagnoli, which is only a few hundred metres from the site of Monday’s murder, 6-month- old baby Zhou Zheng, during an attempted kidnapping was shot in the arms of her father. In 2004 in the Lago Azzuro restaurant in Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, Rome’s quasi-Chinatown, a Chinese business man was also killed by a gunshot to the head, while he was dining at a table in the restaurant. 

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