Beijing airport bomber sentenced to 6 year jail term

A disabled man who set off a bomb in Beijing's international airport in July has been sentenced to six years in prison, as some in China expressed sympathy for his stated protest against police brutality. 

Thirty-four-year old Ji Zhongxing appeared at both the trial and the sentencing on Tuesday in a stretcher, as authorities determined that he was guilty of causing an explosion, wrote AFP. 

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The Beijing Chaoyang District Court decided on a sentence less than the potential maximum of 10 years, writes the South China Morning Post, which added that he has ten days to file a written appeal against the sentence. 

The disabled Ji says that he was paralyzed after a beating in 2005 by city security guards in Dongguan, a southern city in China, motivating him to bring a bomb to the Beijing airport to bring attention to police brutality. Ji has also claimed that the bomb went off accidentally, according to Al Jazeera. 

Authorities in Guangdong appear to have agreed to take a second look at Ji's original complaint, writes Reuters, a rare concession from the Chinese government.

A number of Chinese Internet users were sympathetic to Ji, wrote AFP. "How many people on the bottom rung of society would choose to 'defend their rights in a legal manner'? And have China's bureaucrats and so-called laws defended their rights?" one user wrote, per an AFP translation.