BEIJING — Chinese police arrested a deaf fugitive Friday in a string of explosions that killed at least 108 people in the northern industrial city of Shijiazhuang, Xinhua news agency reported.
Jin Ruchao "confessed all his crimes" after his capture in the beach resort of Beihai in southwestern Guangxi province, the official news agency said.
State television showed police in camouflage uniforms bundling Jin, relaxed and smiling in a gray shirt and brown trousers, into a black car outside a Beihai primary school.
He was picked up after a nationwide manhunt in which a bounty of $18,000 was put on his head.
Explosions ripped through four dormitories in Shijiazhuang just before dawn last Friday, sparking fears over public safety and alarming top leaders already worried over social breakdown amid wrenching industrial reform in Chinese cities.
Jin, 40, also admitted to the murder of his girlfriend in the southern province of Yunan a week before the blasts, Xinhua said.
Beihai, near the Chinese border with Vietnam, is notorious for its smuggling and gangs. It is a jumping-off point for illegal emigration to Southeast Asia organised by so-called "snakehead" crime syndicates.
Jin's photograph was splashed across national newspapers and broadcast on local television stations around the country.
Police picked up his trail in Beihai on Thursday evening with the help of the public, Xinhua said, without giving details.
He was being questioned and would stand trial, it said.
Despite official reports that Jin was deaf and communicated with a pen and paper, state television showed him apparently speaking easily with police.
One of the nearly simultaneous blasts flattened a five-storey dormitory block housing 48 families at Shijiazhuang's Number 3 cotton mill.
The official death toll is 108, with 38 injured, but unofficial estimates go much higher.
Police have said Jin was their main suspect but he could have had help from accomplices or a criminal gang in Shijiazhuang, capital of northern Hebei province and a centre of the textile industry.
He was fired from the Number 3 cotton mill in 1983 for "hooliganism" but kept a room in the factory's dormitory.
However, many Shijiazhuang residents doubt that Jin could have coordinated four blasts.
They point to a host of social problems in Shijiazhuang that could be behind the blasts, including unemployment, corruption and organised crime.
Shijiazhuang is filled with laid off workers seething with resentment against a socialist state that once promised to look after them for life.
China laid off 1.4 million workers from the textile sector between 1998 and 2000 under a programme to cut production and boost efficiency.
Following the blasts, China launched a nationwide crackdown on the use of explosives, which are widely available and frequently used by ethnic separatists, blackmailers, criminal gangs, robbers, and even jilted lovers.