Media hunts Hangzhou's glamorous kitten killer

Beijing: China's media have launched a nationwide hunt for a glamorously dressed woman who has been photographed apparently crushing a kitten to death with her stiletto heels.

Gruesome pictures, which first appeared on a website, have been reproduced in recent days in many newspapers. In the first picture, the woman, wearing a cocktail dress with a leopard-print top and black skirt, caresses a tortoiseshell kitten lovingly.

Then she puts it on the ground, looks at it and lowers a stiletto heel on to its head. The subsequent images are graphic and deeply disturbing, culminating in the woman grinding the cat's head to a bloody pulp. The last photograph shows the woman staring into the distance with a questioning look on her face.

Reporters and amateur sleuths are now trying to find the woman, while media outlets have been flooded with readers' suggestions of what should be done to her.

The location for the sequence has been identified from a stretch of water in the background as being Hangzhou, a picturesque city southwest of Shanghai.

Some newspapers then came up with a new twist linking the pictures to an international community of animal sadists and fetishists. An internet surfer came across a 37-year-old woman from Hubei province with the internet identity "Gainmas". She had registered a site called www.crushworld.net in Hangzhou and the ultimate evidence had bought a pair of stilettoes on eBay last year.

She was also registered with QQ, a popular Chinese message service, where she wrote of herself: "I furiously crush everything to do with you and me."