A CHINESE woman studying in Toronto was murdered in her bedroom – as her boyfriend watched, helpless, from 11,000 miles away.

The Telegraph reports that 23-year-old Qian ‘Nicole’ Liu, who is from Beijing and was a student at York University, was speaking to her boyfriend, Meng Xianchao, on a webcam in her bedroom, when there was a knock on her door.

Detective Sergeant Frank Skubic from Toronto police explained what happened:

She opened the door to a male. She could have known the male but he was unknown to the online witness.

The man asked to use Liu’s mobile phone, before a violent struggle ensued.

Xianchao tried to get help from Liu’s friends through social networking sites – but it was ten hours before police arrived at the scene and found her semi-naked body.

This week, he appealed on a Chinese social media site for people to respect her memory, the Toronto Star reports:

Don’t spread the information around lightly. Right now her family and friends are deeply saddened. Don’t allow others to view this as some sort of amusement, OK? That’s meaningless . . . Whether you knew her or not, please give her some peace. I’m thanking you here. I’m begging you

Police are attempting to retrieve the webcam images and the girl’s laptop, which was removed from the scene.

Liu’s flatmates have said they believe the man was pursuing her romantically.

Meanwhile, Liu’s father, Jianhui Liu – who is a senior official at the institution responsible for training Communist Party officials in China – said she spoke to her mother only an hour before she was attacked, and said she wanted to come home.

He told Ming Pao, a Chinese newspaper, that she was waiting to see whether she had been accepted to university in China before she came back.

We just hope the police can locate the murderer as soon as possible — find the murderer and give justice to my daughter.