A healer being investigated over the ‘slap therapy’ death of a British grandmother has appeared in an Australian court to face charges of killing a six-year-old boy.
Hong Chi Xiao uses controversial methods which, followers claim, remove toxins from the body by hard, repeated slapping and painful stretching on a bench.
He is being investigated over the death of Danielle Carr-Gomm, 71, who was found dead hours after taking part in one of his workshops at a country hotel in Seend, Wiltshire last year.
While that investigation is ongoing, Xiao has been extradited to Australia and has now appeared in a court in New South Wales over the manslaughter of a diabetic boy, who he allegedly encouraged to participate in slapping therapy instead of taking insulin in 2015.
Hong Chi Xiao, who was investigated over the death of a 71-year-old woman in Britain, has been extradited to Australia where he is accused of the manslaughter of a six-year-old boy
The New South Wales Supreme Court heard claims he denied the child insulin for five days and put him on a fasting regime of dates and ginger water.
Xiao is accused of carrying out the therapy on the unnamed Australian boy even when it became apparent that the boy’s condition was deteriorating.
Prosecutors in the UK said they are still deciding whether to charge Xiao over Ms Carr-Gomm’s death in October 2016.
A spokesman for Wiltshire police said: ‘A 54-year-old man has been extradited to New South Wales in relation to an ongoing criminal case in Australia.
Prosecutors in the UK are still deciding whether to charge Xiao over Danielle Carr-Gomm’s death in October 2016
‘In relation to the Seend case, a file has been submitted to the CPS and we are awaiting a charging decision.’
The Australian boy took part in the £1065 ($1800) a week course at the Tasly Healthpac centre in Hurstville, New South Wales in April 2015.
It was run by Xiao, a US national, and other attendees claim the boy was vomiting regularly after a few days, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
The child had a seizure and lapsed into unconsciousness from which he never recovered. He died of diabetic ketoacidosis, the bail hearing was told.
His parents and grandmother – who cannot be named for legal reasons – have also been charged with manslaughter.
Xiao, who the court heard has no medical qualifications, claimed the death was due to the poisonous effects of insulin.
Xiao was refused bail on the grounds that he posed a flight risk and presented a danger to the community.
Mrs Carr-Gomm, a Type 1 diabetes sufferer from East Sussex, had stopped taking insulin after undergoing previous workshops.
Following her death, Xiao was among two men and a woman arrested by Wiltshire Police on suspicion of manslaughter.
Patients at the sessions attended by Ms Carr-Goom paid up to £750 for the ‘slap therapy’
Speaking at the time, the grandmother-of-four’s son Matthew, 43, who lives in New Zealand, said: ‘She’d been deceived and persuaded by this guy that it was a practice that would cure her. It’s been a huge shock for the family.
‘I spoke to her the week before and she had been thoroughly convinced that it [slap therapy] would have a benefit towards a disease which she’d battled with since her late 50’s.
‘She was very open to alternative therapies – she tried acupuncture and she changed her diet a lot of the time, but largely reasonably harmless things..
‘On reflection it turned out that it was a very dangerous practice. She said after her first practice that she felt a lot better.
‘She was persuaded by them that it would work, but she didn’t research enough into the background and other stories on the internet and other fatalities linked to it.
‘Maybe if she’d of Googled it she may have been a little bit more careful or cynical about the treatment.’
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