A Chinese man has been detained on suspicion of keeping six women in secret underground rooms as his sex slaves for two years and killing two of them.

Li Hao allegedly kidnapped women who worked as hostesses at karaoke bars and locked them in two small rooms he had dug beneath a rented basement in Luoyang city in Henan province.

The secret rooms were in a residential complex away from his home, where his wife and son lived unaware of the alleged kidnappings, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported.

Police confirmed that a man named Li Hao who works for the city’s technological supervision bureau had been taken into custody.

The newspaper reported Mr Li was a former firefighter and claimed he regularly raped the women and would give them food only once every two days to keep them weak.

Over time, some of the captives started competing with one another for his attention and two of them ended up fighting. Mr Li killed one of them with the help of another woman.

He also killed one of the other women who was said to have been “disobedient”, burying both bodies in the corner of one of the rooms.