A gambling addict received the death penalty Thursday for murdering two kids in Beijing last year.

The Beijing Municipal No. 1 Intermediate People's Court also stripped Wen Quan, 43, of his political rights for life and ordered him to hand over 1.4 million yuan (221,293 U.S. dollars) in compensation to the victims' families.

The court found that Wen kidnapped a five-year-old boy and a six-year-old girl from his community in Xicheng district on May 21, 2011. He suffocated them to death on separate occasions and dumped their bodies.

The jobless Wen confessed that he was angry after loosing 2 million yuan of his life-savings through gambling online. He was envious of his neighbors as he considered their lives better than his, and decided to murder the two children next door before killing his own son and committing suicide.

He said that on the day of the murder he gambled online again but lost another 300,000 yuan. He killed the two children as he planned, but did not have the heart to kill his own son, he said.