AN ONLINE MANHUNT has come to an end after the parents of a boy in China apologised to the world for his being a typical teenager.
Young Ding Jinhao felt compelled to scratch his name into an ancient Egyptian relic on the east bank of the Nile River while on holiday some years ago. As it turns out, that wasn’t the wisest move.
The whole affair kicked off again on 24 May when a photo of the 3,500-year-old artwork appeared on social networking site Weibo. It showed the graffiti, which said ‘Ding Jinhao was here’, on the temple at Luxor. It was shared up to 100,000 times, outraging the readership, many of whom then went on to participate in a “human flesh search”.
Yes, that can be as scary as it sounds.
Internet users posted the boy’s name, birth date and address, forcing action from the parents. The family told a local newspaper in Nanjing that they were sorry for not educating the 15-year-old properly and pleaded with society to give him a chance, reports the Global Times in China.
“This is too much pressure for him to take,” said his father.
But the Global Times notes that it isn’t a one-way street. “Reporters discovered that the Great Wall, a must-see for both Chinese and foreign tourists who come to Beijing, also bears graffiti in foreign languages,” it wrote.
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