CHINESE fish farmer Cai Guan Chen crossed the world in search of a better life.

But he ended up as the victim of a vicious murder after becoming embroiled in the international drug trade.

The 38-year-old father-of-three paid £15,000 to a people smuggler and arrived in the UK illegally on September 6, 2001. Initially he worked in a restaurant in London, living with his girlfriend Lee Wang and sending money back to his wife in China.

But tempted by the bigger money possibilities of the underworld drug business, he turned himself into a master cannabis grower who contracted out his services. On January 2, 2009, he travelled north by train from King’s Cross station to join the Elvington skunk cannabis factory his killers, Bao Lung Huang and Zhouli Zhang, had started setting up in August. Major building works were under way weeks before Mr Chen joined the group and, like others in the gang, started living in Heslington Lane, York.

Detective Superintendent Karnail Dulku said all three had received investment from shadowy backers and that one of these may have been the sister of a prominent Chinese businessman who has worldwide contacts and an annual turnover of hundreds of million pounds.

Police believe Zhang and Huang had wanted to con one of the backers but Mr Chen objected, possibly because in order to get future cannabis-growing contracts he had to preserve his reputation.

At 7.50pm on January 16, 2009, a fortnight after he arrived in York, he spoke to another Chinese man in a 14-minute phone call and told him he was locked into a room. It was the last phone call he ever took and detectives believe he was murdered that night.

Nothing more was heard about him for more than two months. When his girlfriend tried repeatedly to contact him, members of the gang told her he had caught a train out of York.

They had already covered up bloodstains on a wall in the warehouse with plasterboard and made other attempts to clean up after his murder.

On March 20, pike fishermen Craig Murphy and Darryl Ashwell accidentally hooked something in Selby Canal near Burn. It turned out to be Mr Chen’s decomposing body, with rope wrapped round its back, head and shoulder and a bin liner over the head. He had been savagely beaten to death, suffering three fractures to his jaw and a “hinge fracture” to the back of his skull which was alone enough to kill him. His forearm had been broken, possibly as he tried to defend himself from a murderous onslaught of kicks and blows, and his larynx had been crushed.

Investigators concluded his body had been weighed down when he was dumped in the canal by gang members in January and the weights had been disturbed and washed off by the passage of a pleasure boat, City of Hull, early on March 20 when the water level was low.