Deep in debt due to business losses, Ma Hoanh Thanh thought he was being framed so he took revenge and blew up a house containing homemade explosives, killing 83 people that night.
On July 16, 2001, Mafang village in Hengshan county, Shaanxi province suffered an unprecedented disaster.
Mafang is an obscure village on the Shaanxi Plateau. In recent years, the village has become known for its illegal production of explosives to supply nearby quarries. According to the villagers, the production of explosives is simple and the profits are huge, so everyone rushes to do it, but this makes the whole village feel like “living on the edge of a volcano”.
Big explosion in the middle of the night
Du Hai Chien, a resident of Ma Phuong, said that at around 3:00 a.m. on July 16, 2001, a loud "bang" shook him, his bed was thrown up, and he fell to the ground.
Half an hour later, Mr. Chien was shocked to hear that his six nephews and eldest brother were buried under the rubble of an explosion that occurred right in the village. A classmate of Mr. Chien's youngest son also died while visiting Ma Phuong. He was lucky to escape death because the night before he had gone out to the village to watch the melon field.
Ma Shigui’s family home, the epicenter of the explosion, was gouged into a “lake” 36 meters long, 27 meters wide, and 7 meters deep, with underground water gushing out. Dozens of houses around Gui’s home were flattened.
Half of the village was almost destroyed. Windows within a 5km radius were shattered. Trees and crops within a 1km radius were destroyed by the shock wave. Countless livestock and poultry were killed or injured…
The explosion killed 83 villagers from 71 households, injured 98, damaged 311 houses, and caused direct economic losses of more than 5.6 million yuan. Most of the dead were young people and children, as the elderly lived in huts on the hillside, far from the scene of the incident; the young people settled down the hillside near the road, and Gui's house was right next to it.
A total of five families in Ma Phuong were wiped out, with no survivors (including Quy's family) due to the explosion. There were 4-5 families with only one person left.
A man named Ma Dun Dun lost eight family members, including his parents, wife, two children, younger brother, sister-in-law, and nephew. On the evening of July 15, he went out to water the fields alone and escaped death. Yu Zi Sheng, 34, and his wife were injured in the explosion, but lost three daughters and a son.
Hunt for the Evil One
In parallel with the rescue and relief work, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security sent a team of more than 20 investigation and technical experts to the scene to coordinate with local police to determine the cause of the incident.
Through investigation, the explosives that caused the explosion were stored by Ma The Binh (39 years old), a resident of Ma Phuong village, at the house of Ma The Quy's younger brother, the quantity amounted to tens of tons. On July 18, Binh turned himself in, confessing to the illegal production and storage of explosives.
To clarify the nature of the incident, the working group of the Ministry of Public Security organized relevant experts to research and scientifically analyze the explosives that Binh illegally produced and stored, eliminating the possibility of the explosives spontaneously exploding, concluding that this was an explosion caused by a criminal.
Through interrogation, the police discovered a villager from Ma Phuong named Ma Hoanh Thanh (51 years old) with serious suspicion.
Thanh, who was illiterate, opened a quarry in 1995 and also produced explosives himself, but his business continued to suffer losses. The explosive factories, quarries, and chicken farms that Thanh cooperated with others had to close down one after another, losing tens of thousands of yuan. Due to his bad character and extremely bad reputation, no one wanted to cooperate with Thanh anymore, and most of the villagers also did not want to associate with him.
Thanh had deep conflicts with Liu Shiwei, Ma Shiping and other villagers who specialized in illegally manufacturing explosives. Before the incident, many people came to collect debts, causing Thanh to be under great mental pressure, showing unusual emotions and threatening revenge.
On August 2, Thanh was questioned by police, but he only confessed to illegally manufacturing explosives. However, Thanh’s daughter’s diary exposed his crimes.
Thanh’s daughter wrote in her diary about her father’s unusual behavior, including drunken statements like “I’m going to blow him up…” and “If I can’t take him down, I’ll blow him up.” After repeated interrogations, Thanh confessed to the crime.
Plot to 'blow up and kill' the enemy
On August 16, Thanh was prosecuted by the Yulin City Procuratorate, Shaanxi Province.
According to the indictment, Thanh had been losing money in business and had accumulated a lot of debt in recent years. He thought that Luu The Vi was the one behind the trouble, so he had the idea of blowing Vi up to death.
On July 15, Thanh brought back two detonators and 14 meters of fuse from his quarry in Yan'an City. At around 3 a.m. on July 16, he sneaked into Quy's house with the detonators and fuse, intending to steal the explosives. The windows were tied with steel wire, so he could only reach in to touch the explosives but not take them out. However, Thanh did not give up.
Thinking about the debt of more than 100,000 yuan and the years of miserable life, Thanh suddenly thought: "What is the meaning of living? I might as well die!"
He picked up a branch from the ground, poked a small hole in the explosive bag that he could reach, lit the fuse with the detonator attached, and stuffed it into the explosive bag. While the fuse burned, Thanh was afraid that he would not die but become disabled, so he quickly fled the scene and returned home. At 3:25 a.m., more than 30 tons of homemade ammonium nitrate explosive stored at Quy's house were detonated.
Du Lam City People's Procuracy accused Thanh of disregarding the law, acting recklessly, disregarding people's lives and property, seriously endangering public safety, and committing the crime of causing an explosion that resulted in the death of many people and caused great damage.
After the trial, Ma Hoanh Thanh was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad on the morning of September 23, 2001. Ma The Binh and an accomplice were also sentenced to death for illegally manufacturing and trading explosives.
Impact of the shocking case
The explosion caused by illegally stored explosives at the storage site shocked the whole country, making Ma Phuong famous overnight, in an unexpected way.
In recent years, this farming village has developed another “industry”, which is the illegal production of explosives. Although the government has issued many bans and strict measures, this situation still continues in Mafang. Some families have developed production to a significant scale, and illegal explosives are sold to many small coal mines in many localities. As the government’s inspections have become more stringent, the explosives factories in the mountains can no longer operate openly, and some households have relocated and hidden the finished explosives in their homes, leading to the tragedy.
According to preliminary investigation, in April 2001, during a local production safety inspection, Binh's illegal homemade explosives workshop on the mountain was sealed, but the seal was not tight, allowing Binh to secretly transfer the unsold explosives to his younger brother's house in Ma Phuong for hiding.
On the afternoon of July 18, the director of the Hoanh Son district police was dismissed from his position, detained and investigated. The chief and deputy chief of the town police station were also detained.
On July 30, the Shaanxi provincial government issued a statement that although the explosion was caused by human sabotage, it also exposed serious problems such as bureaucracy and formalism in government at all levels. Some localities, departments and units did not fully take into account the repeated instructions of the central government and the provincial party committee and provincial government. Production safety measures were not thoroughly implemented, and some places even ignored and were indifferent.
The horrific explosion forced the Shaanxi provincial government to take many measures to rectify and correct mistakes.
