Poor guy may very well have been thrown to his death after being tortured. You can't trust any news coming out of China. Take it from somebody who lives here. You can just as well assume the opposite of what the story says, and 90% of the time you'd be closer to the truth.
This suicide story reminds me of the botched fake-suicide in Shishou that resulted in 3 days of rioting in mid-June.
.........
Rule of law doesn't exist here. For all we know, the officials investigating the suicide were complicit in the victim's murder. All that matters is your guanxi and which local officials are in your pocket or somehow indebted to you. It is extremely likely that there's more to this than is being reported.
I agree that unfortunately, the media and police reports from China may not be completely reliable. They are controlled by the government and could be influenced to a certain degree... if you want proof, look at the recent treatment of Tibet and Urumqi riots... they are getting more open, but are still protective. OTOH, although the net is a free for all environment, the bloggers often forced the government and corporations to at least come up with responses rather than cover-ups.
I am not even sure if the 'suicide' is necessarily confirmed. Yes, we need proof.. but how to get it? It is not easy to get access to truth.... you have to think about how likely is a Foxconn employee (at 25, I'm assuming not a very high level employee) is given FULL responsibility of handling ALL the prototypes by himself for shipping? No redundancy check???
If so, the fault is Foxconn's... for having a system that allows an employee to lose something as important as a prototype.. so easily! You'd think Apple's probably periodic auditing of the factory should expose such problems! You have to think that in order to 'lose' a prototype, some higher up officials are involved and I can't but help think that the employee is a scapegoat.
As for the government, they may not be covering for Foxconn necessarily, but what kind of image is this incident going to project for the future investors from the West? If the police is covering up, they may be doing it to preserve the local factories so that jobs won't be lost when investors pull out due to serious thoughts about IP issues...
No.. there's no proof of these because the investigations are going to be closed-door and nothing will be of public record. One thing that can be said, a prototype is not worth losing someone's life over. It is truly a tragedy that he died.
In the end , even if it turned out he was a careless guy who happened to have misplaced the iPhone and someone else stole it and didn't know what it was and sold it .... he still doesn't deserve to die. Like I said, the system (or lack thereof) failed .. he should only be partially responsible IF he had anything to do with it....