The attackers were arrested, and the authorities claimed they were members of a sect called Eastern Lightning also known as "Church of Almighty God".

After presenting their religious message, they demanded that customers supply their cell phone numbers for future contacts.

[10] On May 31, Zhang Lidong's jailhouse interview was broadcast in which he showed no remorse for Wu's murder, saying "I beat her with all my might and stamped on her too.

"[11] Zhang reported having been a member of a group worshipping "Almighty God",[1] that Chinese authorities identified with Eastern Lightning.

[1] At trial, Lü Yingchun explained that it was indispensable to kill the saleswoman, as she was a particularly dangerous "evil spirit": "Zhang Hang asked that lady for her phone number, but she refused to give it to her.

Chinese authorities claimed that the perpetrators belonged to the Church of Almighty God, and this version was widely reported in the immediate aftermath of the murder and beyond by mainstream Western media.

[15] Even prior to the attack, the sect had been banned in China, and in the wake of the murder, authorities engaged in widespread arrests of Church of Almighty God members.

Reporter Yang Feng published the confessions of the main defendants during the trial, including passages where both Lü Yingchun and Zhang Fan claimed that theirs was a different "Almighty God" church from the one also known as Eastern Lightning and whose leader is Zhao Weishan.

"[1] In the same issue of The Beijing News, a team of five journalists led by Xiao Hui and Zhang Yongsheng published an investigative piece on the history of the group responsible for the murder, that they nicknamed "the Almighty God family."

They stated that both Lü Yingchun and Zhang Fan had some contacts with Zhao Weishan's Church of Almighty God as young women, but later the main influence on their group were two independent preachers from Baotou, Inner Mongolia, Li Youwang and Fan Bin, although Lü and Zhang broke with them when the preachers refused to acknowledge that the two women were divine incarnations.

[19] In her book on Eastern Lighting, published by Brill in 2015, Australian scholar Emily Dunn quoted Yang Feng's article and noted that, "International media outlets repeated the Chinese assessment of the Church of Almighty God as bizarre and violent.

What they overlooked were Lu Yingchun and Zhang Fan's statements to the court that although they started out as members of Eastern Lightning (in 1998 and 2007 respectively), they had outgrown it.

"[4] In his 2020 book Inside the Church of Almighty God, published by Oxford University Press, Massimo Introvigne, whose organization CESNUR had been called the "highest profile lobbying and information group for controversial religions,"[20] devoted a long chapter to the murder, and insisted, based on his interpretation of the Phoenix Television's interview and the Beijing News articles, that neither Lü Yingchun nor Zhang Fan had ever been members of Eastern Lightning.

Although Lü maintained that hers was a group based on the belief that she and Zhang Fan were the real Almighty God, she also blamed books and Web sites of Eastern Lightning for having "ideologically corrupted" them in their youth.