According to the statement, the suspect was identified as the only student with official access to thallium in her experiment for undergraduate research. She was detained by the police department on April 2, 1997, and signed a paper acknowledging she was a suspect. Sun Wei's family retrieved her from the police after eight hours of interrogation. In her statement, she also claimed that, according to the law, she was cleared as a suspect in August 1998. However, in a "Morning News Post" report dated March 2006, Zhu Ling's lawyer, Zhang Jie said of the suspect, "She was only exempted from the compulsory measure that she was subjected to as a suspect at that time, but not excluded from suspicion."