(Minghui.org) A Maoming City, Guangdong Province resident is in serious condition two months after she was arrested for practicing Falun Gong. The police recently contacted her family and ordered them to pay part of her medical treatment. Her family refused and are holding the police accountable for her condition.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.
Ms. Wu Youqing, 55, was arrested when she went out on the evening of September 26, 2022. More than ten officers, including two armed officers with riot shields, showed up at her home after midnight.
Ms. Wu’s sister, who was living with her, was terrified and refused to open the door. The police damaged the door with a metal object and broke in. They ransacked her home until 3 a.m. and confiscated a large amount of Falun Gong materials.
Ms. Wu was put on criminal detention on September 28 and taken to the Xinyi Detention Center. Because of her doing the Falun Gong exercises on October 4, the guards shackled her. The shackles were still on when her lawyer visited her on October 11.
Prosecutor Qiu Jing of the Gaozhou City Procuratorate approved Ms. Wu’s arrest on October 12.
On October 23, a detention center guard called Ms. Wu’s family and said she had been on a hunger strike for five days. The guard urged them to apply for Ms. Wu’s release on medical bail. With the lawyer’s help, her family prepared a medical bail application. But when they went to the Gaozhou City Police Department to submit it, the police refused to accept the document.
Although the police accepted their application the next day, they rejected it a day later, claiming that Ms. Wu’s condition had stabilized and she wasn’t qualified for medical release.
The lawyer went to the detention center on October 25 to visit Ms. Wu, but was turned away by a guard on duty, who claimed that the lawyer had passed a high-risk COVID-19 region on his way there. The lawyer argued that he would only be meeting Ms. Wu through a video call and had no way of transmitting the virus, but the guard still forced him to undergo two days of quarantine before allowing him to talk to Ms. Wu on October 28.
According to the lawyer, Ms. Wu was very weak and couldn’t talk clearly after eleven days of being on a hunger strike. She also vomited several times during the meeting.
That same day, the police deceived Ms. Wu’s family into signing a document stating that her physical condition didn’t qualify her for release on medical bail.
Ms. Wu’s family called the detention center on November 10 and was told that the guards had taken her to the hospital for intravenous feeding. Her condition was stable, but she still refused to eat.
The family learned on November 21 that Ms. Wu had been transferred to the Maoming City No. 1 Detention Center, one day before the police submitted her case to the Maonan District Procuratorate. But after being on a hunger strike for one month, she was having problems with her digestive system and vomited when she ate.
The police called Ms. Wu’s family on November 24 and said she was in serious condition and had been taken to the hospital for emergency treatment. They refused to let the family visit her, but ordered them to pay for two albumin injections (about 1,000 yuan), which is usually used to treat shock following serious injury and to increase blood plasma.
The family refused to pay. They said that Ms. Wu was very healthy when she was arrested and they indicated that they will hold the police accountable for her condition.
Qiu Jing (邱静), prosecutor, Gaozhou City Procuratorate: +86-668-6635110Chen Fei (陈飞), officer, Gaozhou Domestic Security OfficeZhou Weixue (周维学), officer, Gaozhou Domestic Security Office: +86-13927593339Liang Shuang (梁爽), director, Gaozhou City Police Department: +86-13824877688
(More perpetrators’ contact information is available in the original Chinese article.)
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