Xiaoling Khin, a senior from Henan province in China, was one of seven people reported killed on their way to a university campus in Chongqing in eastern China on Monday night. Two young sisters, one male and one female, were also found dead in the same vehicle by passersby. The youngest was aged less than one year old when they disappeared. All seven had been decapitated and one of the male’s hands was left attached to the truck. A third body has not yet been found.

The victims are believed to have been kidnapped after going to the bus stop at about 10pm on Friday, when the women were last seen, the Xinhua news agency cited a witness as saying.

China has endured mass murders and disappearances of its own citizens in recent years. After a Chinese student was abducted in late May near the coastal city of Shandong, a relative had told the BBC that the men had carried out the attack because their wife could not support them financially.

The Chinese student had reportedly contacted her kidnappers in China in May and told them where she was going and that she was returning home. Then, late on July 3, her phone was traced to a remote village in the south-western province of Zhejiang. A gang of 20 to 30 men appeared at the location after midnight the next morning and held the woman, according to the report in the South China Morning Post.

The student later told the authorities that she had been forced to work as a nurse in a hospital in Liaoning province after running away from her family home in Henan during her second year of university. It is not clear where she spent her last day.

The BBC’s Simon Reeve in Beijing said the case highlighted growing concern about what China is doing to investigate disappearances of its citizens as the country attempts to develop a more “open” society.

Mr Xi is currently presiding over China’s biggest “One Belt One Road” (OBOR) summit, which kicks off on Friday and where he will meet his counterparts from across Asia, including the Japanese prime minister. China has said it will boost trade and investment with the project in Africa as well as the Middle East.

Mr Xi is the most powerful leader in China since Chairman Mao Zedong, as well as the first Communist Party general secretary. “We have never had such a high level meeting with other leaders in our history. From now on, it