A suspect tried to blend in with 60,000 concertgoers. China’s facial-recognition cameras caught him
The 31-year-old man, wanted by police, had thought playing a numbers game would be enough to allow him to fade into anonymity.
The population of China is a staggering 1.4 billion people, give or take a few million.
More than 45 million of them live in Jiangxi province in southeast China, and 5 million of those people are concentrated in Nanchang, the province’s capital.
On the night of April 7, nearly 60,000 people — or roughly 1 percent of the city’s population — had gathered at the Nanchang International Sports Center for a concert by Cantopop legend Jacky Cheung.
Who could ever locate a single person in such a crowd?
And so it was there, amid the sea of faces in a packed stadium, with everyone’s attention presumably turned to the stage, that the fugitive assumed he was safe from authorities. [Continue reading…]
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