Chinese authorities apologized to the parents of an 18-year-old man who was wrongfully convicted and executed for the rape and murder of a woman in a public toilet 18 years ago.

The official Xinhua news agency said a court cleared Huugjilt, an ethnic Mongolian man, of raping and murdering a woman in Inner Mongolia's capital Hohhot on April 9, 1996.

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The accused was sentenced to death and executed that same year, but Xinhua reported that another man admitted committing the crime after his arrest in 2005.

In a retrial for Huugjilt last month, he was cleared of all the charges.

The victim's mother, 62-year-old Shang Aiyun, said she would set fire to a copy of the court's decision on her son's grave to "comfort his spirit that has been suffering from the pain of a wrongful charge." 

The man's parents, who insisted their son did not commit the crimes, have been asking China's supreme court and the region's higher court to overturn the conviction since 2006.

The family received the equivalent of around $5,000 "as an expression of the court's sympathy and were told they could claim an unspecified amount of compensation."

In April 1996, Huugjilt reported to the police he heard someone cry out in a women's toilet as he passed by.

He was arrested and a month later, Huugjilt was sentenced to death by a Hohhot court. Higher courts threw out his appeal and approved his execution on June 10, 1996.

Investigators who were working at the time in the Hohhot public security office confessed their work performance was evaluated by an yearly quota on the number of criminal cases they uncovered. Court documents showed the detectives were "eager to wind up a case" and they resorted to illegal punishment in cracking their cases.

Despite the police admission, a higher court did approve the quick execution of Huugjilt notwithstanding the fact that evidence was "questionable or inadequate," based on the retrial.