A Chinese student who fled the U.S. after murdering his girlfriend in Iowa and stuffing her body into a car trunk has been sentenced to life imprisonment in China.

Xiangnan Li, 24, was found guilty of murdering his girlfriend, Tong Shao, while they were both studying at the University of Iowa. The 20-year-old was strangled to death by Li before being stuffed inside the trunk of her own car in September 2014.

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The couple checked into a hotel in Nevada, Iowa together on Sept. 5, and Shao was last spotted alive the following day at the hotel. Shao was reported missing by her roommates, and her body was found on Sept. 26 in Iowa City.

According to Chinese prosecutors, Li had purchased a suitcase and two dumb bells and had plans to sink the dead body to the bottom of a pond, but later had second thoughts and scrapped the plan.

Shortly after killing his girlfriend, Li fled to China and was on the run for as long as eight months before turning himself in to Chinese authorities.

In the presence of Iowa investigators, he was convicted of intentional homicide at the Intermediate People's Court in the eastern Chinese city of Wenzhou on Wednesday, months after he admitted to murdering Shao at a hearing in March.

Shao's family was disappointed by Li's sentence, as he had faced the death penalty for the crime. They accepted a sum of two million yuan ($308,000) as civil compensation.

"We were at least expecting a death sentence with reprieve even though we had accepted the compensation," said the victim's father, Chunsheng Shao, according to CNN.

TagsXiangnan Li, Tong Shao, university of iowa, china, US, Iowa