Fugitive caught in metro Atlanta convicted of killing his wife in New Zealand

A New Zealand jury convicted an international fugitive who hid out in Atlanta for several months after murdering is wife and abandoning his 3-year-old daughter at a train station where he started of his solo run from justice.

Nai Yin Xue will be sentenced July 31 in the High Court in Auckland, New Zealand, for killing his 28-year-old wife, An An Liu, and leaving her naked body in the trunk of a car in September 2007. He could be sentenced to life.

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HYOSUB SHIN / hshin@ajc.com

Wei Chen (center) of Chamblee talks about the 2008 moment he tackled Nai Yin Xue, a murderer and fugitive, as Xin Bao Li (left) and Gui Senwu look on. Xue was recently convicted of murdering his wife in New Zealand. It was six Chinese immigrants in the Atlanta area who turned him in.

Xue had disappeared into Atlanta’s Mandarin-speaking community soon after arriving in the United States, and he was safe there until six Chinese immigrants from Chamblee turned him in.

Just five months earlier, surveillance cameras at a Melbourne train station had captured images of his crying child and of him passing through a security checkpoint without her.

Eight days later in New Zealand, police found Liu, strangled with a necktie.

Xue, owner-publisher of the Chinese Times newspaper, passed himself off to his new friends in the metro Atlanta as “Mr. Tang” and a martial arts expert who was interested in starting a massage business.

On Feb. 26, 2008, one of Xue’s new friends saw an article in the Chinese newspaper World Journal about a man wanted in New Zealand but believed to be in the United States.

The man in the photograph that went with the article looked familiar, so the men called police.

Two days later the six men set a trap and captured Xue and hog-tied him until police arrived.

Xue’s defense in his trial was that his wife may have died accidentally during consensual sex involving a necktie, and he did not know his wife was dead when he flew to Melbourne.

The little girl, according to authorities, is “happy, healthy and thriving” and living with her grandmother in China.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.