A Chinese police chief accused online of keeping twin sisters as mistresses has been sacked, state media said Monday, the latest official to fall in a sex and corruption scandal in China in recent weeks.
Qi Fang, police chief of Wusu, a small city in China's northwestern Xinjiang province, was removed from his post after it emerged he kept twin mistresses and found them jobs in the police force, the state-run Global Times reported.
He arranged jobs for the women after he was promoted last year to run the local Public Security Bureau, which oversees the police, the report said.
Revelations about Qi's mistresses first emerged on Chinese social networking websites last week, where users have also recently exposed several other lurid cases of corruption by low- and mid-level officials.
A district Communist party secretary in the southwestern megacity of Chongqing was sacked last month after a video showing him having sex with a mistress spread like wildfire online.
One of Qi's twin mistresses was given a position as a special operations officer while the other won a post in the local traffic department, online reports said.
An investigation by the provincial police bureau showed "part of the online accusations are true", the Global Times said, without giving specifics.
While China's 538 million Internet users are able to use microblogs to accuse local officials of corruption, posts making reference to China's most powerful politicians are regularly deleted by online censors.
