BRISBANE, Australia — Yang Zhao, 30, has been found guilty of murdering his flatmate, Qiong Yan, 29, in their inner-Brisbane apartment in September 2020. After striking her with a metal bottle and strangling her, Zhao concealed her body in a large toolbox on their balcony, where it remained hidden for nearly 10 months.
The verdict was delivered after just two hours of jury deliberation in the Brisbane Supreme Court. Zhao had pleaded not guilty to murder but admitted to interfering with Yan’s corpse.
The trial revealed Zhao impersonated Yan for months after her death, sending more than 2,500 WeChat messages to her mother, Rongmei Yan, in China. During that time, he stole over $500,000 through fraudulent bank transfers, deceiving the grieving mother who believed her daughter was still alive.
In a heartbreaking victim impact statement, Rongmei Yan described the trauma of discovering her daughter’s murder.
“When I heard the news that my daughter had been murdered, I suddenly lost the capacity to walk,” she told the court. “After several months of acupuncture treatment, I gradually recovered.”
She traveled from Shanghai to Brisbane to attend the two-week trial.
“I feel sorry that all those days that the person I’ve been talking to was not my daughter … at the time she had already become a skeleton,” she said tearfully.
Zhao, a Chinese national on a student visa, claimed that Yan’s death was accidental and occurred after they both inhaled nitrous oxide (“nangs”) in their apartment. He told the court he panicked after she passed out and died while he was asleep, fearing legal consequences for drug use.
Despite his claims, Zhao admitted to continuing to party, use drugs, and even have sex in the apartment with her decomposing body just metres away.
After his arrest in July 2021, Zhao gave conflicting stories to police, later saying his accounts were inspired by movies and TV dramas while he was intoxicated.
Qiong Yan, also a Chinese national, was the director of a migration agency.
Zhao will be sentenced by Justice Martin Burns, with murder carrying a mandatory life sentence in Queensland.
