Five members of a cult charged with homicide

Five members of a cult, accused of beating to death a woman at a Macdonald's restaurant for refusing to give out her phone number, have been slapped with charges of intentional homicide.
Yantai City People's Procuratorate in Shandong Province filed the charge against the suspects with Yantai Intermediate People's Court on July 21.
The 35-year-old victim, surnamed Wu, was killed on May 28 by members of the secret "Quannengshen" sect meaning Church of Almighty God in Zhaoyuan City, Shandong.
They were trying to recruit followers, police said. Zhang Lidong, 55, the main accused, told CCTV that he did not know the victim and he attacked her as he believed that her refusal to be recruited into his sect proved that "she was a demon and an evil spirit," the Global Times had reported after the murder.

Three other suspects are his two daughters and his 12-year-old son, all members of the sect.
The Church of Almighty God, also known as Eastern Lightning, was set up in the early 1990s by Zhao Weishan, a physics teacher from Heilongjiang, Chinese state media said.
It believes Jesus Christ was reincarnated as a woman surnamed Deng from central Henan province.
It was banned by Chinese authorities in 1995, after which Zhao fled to the US, the Global Times said.