BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese man jailed and badly beaten for his wife's murder has been freed after she turned up not only alive but with another husband, domestic media said on Monday, revealing a brutal arbitrariness to China's legal system.

She Xianglin's wife, Zhang Zaiyu, disappeared after a domestic dispute in 1994 and when a woman's body was found in a local reservoir, She was detained on suspicion of killing his wife, the China Daily said.

The body was so decomposed it could not be identified, but a local court found She, a former part-time police officer from central Hubei province, guilty of murder and sentenced him to death.