A court in southern China has sentenced six men to prison for attempted murder in a hit job that was botched after being subcontracted several times.

According to the Nanning Intermediate People’s Court in Guangxi, in the autumn of 2013 a real estate businessman by the name Qin Youhui hired someone to take out a businessman surnamed Wei, who was suing Qin. But the hitman kept half of the 2m yuan ($280,000) Qin paid and outsourced the job, offering a new assailant the other half.

The job was then contracted out three more times until a fifth man by the name of Ling Xinsi was offered 100,000 yuan ($14,000) to carry out the crime.

In 2014, almost half a year after the original job was commissioned, Ling left Wei a note asking to meet in Nanning. The two met at a coffee shop and Ling told Wei: “For just 100,000 yuan, I don’t want to kill you, but you have to cooperate with me.”

Ling and Wei staged his death, with photos of Wei tied up sent up the chain of command. Ling left the phone he used with Wei, who disappeared for about 10 days and then returned and reported the case to the police.

The Nanning Intermediate People’s Court in Guangxi said in a post on its Wechat account on 17 October that the six defendants “deliberately deprived others of their lives, and their actions constitute the crime of intentional homicide.”

The defendants, excluding Ling who had not been charged at the time, were previously cleared in 2016 after a court excluded evidence on the basis of police misconduct.

The rare acquittal in a court system where the conviction rate is 99% was hailed by some legal experts as a sign of progress in the criminal justice system.

Prosecutors later appealed the case and all six men, Qin and the five hired hitmen, have been sentenced to between two years and seven months to five years in prison.