Xin Zhang has been sentenced for the disgusting act

18:34, 24 Jun 2025Updated 19:10, 24 Jun 2025

Xin Zhang pictured following an earlier hearing(Image: M.E.N.)

A swimmer who pleasured himself in the sauna at a university pool has learned his fate. Xin Zhang, 60, became ‘aroused’ by the feeling of the pool jets on his bottom, prosecutors said.

He pulled his shorts down and touched himself while ‘staring’ at a shocked woman through a window, a court previously heard.

He pleaded guilty to outraging public decency earlier this year. Zhang admitted touching his private parts, but denied he was masturbating or that it was a ‘sexual act’.

At a trial of issue hearing in February, magistrates rejected his account and said it was done for ‘sexual gratification’.

On Tuesday (June 24) appeared at Manchester Magistrates’ Court for sentence. He was sentenced to a 12-month community order and ordered to carry out 180 hours of unpaid work.

Zhang, who has lived in the UK for more than 20 years, was a member of the Tom Husband Leisure Centre at the University of Salford for more than a decade. He went five to six times a week, magistrates were previously told.

One day in the spring of 2023, he said was in the pool for almost an hour before he went into the sauna. Prosecutor Emilee Creasey previously told a court he was seen ‘with his shorts down rubbing his behind on the bench and touching himself in the sauna whilst staring at [a woman] through the glass window of the sauna’.

Xin Zhang outside Tameside Magistrates’ Court following an earlier hearing(Image: Manchester Evening News)

The woman gave evidence in court. She said: “He stood up. He was looking at me. He pulled his pants down just below the knee. He grabbed his penis and I could see his hands they were going up and down. I thought ‘oh my God’.”

She said Zhang carried on for ‘three to four minutes’ before a staff member went in. “I don’t know if it was towards me, I don’t know if it was or it wasn’t,” she added. The woman said said she was ‘100 per cent sure’ what he did was sexual.

Zhang was confronted by staff, who told him he was banned and alerted police. A manager who spoke to Zhang told the court that when asked what he had been doing, he said ‘my chicken’ and ‘gestured with his hands’.

The defendant told police: “Chicken is what I call my genitals.” He told officers in his interview: “I was adjusting the inner layer of my shorts, because of my eczema I have them loose.”

In a basis of plea, Zhang said he was ‘cold from having been swimming and put his hands into his shorts to warm his penis’. He denied he was masturbating, but conceded ‘it may have looked like that for anyone watching’.

Giving evidence at the trial of issue hearing, he said – through a Mandarin interpreter – he lay down in the sauna as he was ‘cold, tired and hungry’, adding: “I sat there for about seven or eight minutes and I still felt cold.

“I realised my waistband had been tied too tight and I loosened my waistband.”

He said that after looking at his privates, he feared that ‘there might be some kind of illness causing a problem’. Zhang added: “I was trying to warm it up.” He said he then heard someone ‘knocking on the windows’.

“I tried to explain to the person it’s not what they saw,” he said. “I also said ‘no’.”

Magistrates said he had ‘provided three different accounts of his actions providing inconsistencies’.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Zhang, of of Foundry Lane, central Manchester, was also ordered to complete 20 rehabilitation activity requirement days and pay £400 in costs and a surcharge of £114.