Northumbria Police believe a Chinese couple who were horrifically murdered last week could have been the target of Chinese gangs after a gambling contract went wrong.

A police investigation into the murder and mutilation of a young Chinese couple was broadened to the Beijing underworld on Saturday as detectives followed up claims that an international criminal syndicate ordered the killings.

Police confirmed that officers had flown to the Chinese capital to help solve the murders of Zhen Xing Yang and his girlfriend Xi Zhou, both 25, whose bodies were found in a flat in Newcastle upon Tyne last Saturday.
The bodies of Yang and Zhou were discovered with serious head injuries in their ground-floor flat. Yang had been tortured. Police believe the couple, who met while studying for masters degrees at Newcastle University, almost certainly knew their killers.

A major Chinese-based international betting syndicate, which employed Yang as an international agent in its efforts to gain an edge when betting on the results of Premier League football games shown in China, is understood to be under investigation by police.

English football matches are shown in China with up to a minute's delay, offering gambling syndicates with live information a critical advantage.
Detectives in China, London and Northumbria are concentrating upon the theory that Yang - known to friends as Kevin - had double-crossed his employers and was visited last weekend by a gang determined to take revenge for missing payments. A series of threats posted on Chinese Mandarin websites by people allegedly recruited by Yang and who had not been paid are being tracked down in UK and China.

Yang, who graduated along with his girlfriend in 2006, might have been tortured because his killers wanted to find cash linked to the alleged racket. He was eventually bludgeoned and stabbed to death. Zhou, a waitress at a Newcastle noodle bar, was asphyxiated, possibly in an attempt to stifle her screams. The murder weapons - a knife and another sharp-edged instrument - have yet to be found.

Although gambling is illegal in China, betting on England's Premier League is booming, with a recent report by Peking University in Beijing estimating the amount wagered online by Chinese punters on football at more than £40bn a year. As a result, Far Eastern betting syndicates, many of which are linked to criminal gangs, are increasingly seeking to penetrate the English game by using agents based in the UK.

Traditionally, such syndicates would pay players to fix Asian games, whereas now they are focusing on the results of the Premier League, whose matches are regularly shown live on Chinese television and attract vast audiences.

Within the gambling-mad football-crazy region, millions of pounds change hands on the outcome. Syndicates stand to make a fortune if they can predict or fix the result.

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