(Minghui.org) Two residents of Jiaohe City, Jilin Province have been detained incommunicado for one year for their faith in Falun Gong. Their families are very worried about them.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.
Ms. Zhu Minglan and Ms. Liu Jialan were first arrested outside of a village on the evening of April 13, 2020. The police, without showing their IDs or an arrest warrant, handcuffed the two practitioners and pushed them into a police car.
At Baishishan Town Police Station, the police body-searched the women. One officer asked Ms. Zhu for her address. When she refused to answer, two officers rolled up a stack of paper and whipped her in the face. Her ears rang and her mind went blank. The officers verbally abused her, and interrogated her until 7 a.m.
The police searched Ms. Zhu’s home the next day without her presence. No list of confiscated items was provided to her or her family. The search warrant the police presented didn’t have any officer’s signature.
Ms. Zhu was forced to sign the interrogation record, after the police threatened her that they wouldn’t release other local practitioners if she didn’t sign it. She was also forced to pay a 5,000 yuan bail bond before being allowed to go home.
Before the police ransacked Ms. Liu’s home, she asked them not to make too much noise, as her bedridden mother-in-law lived with her. One officer blamed her for “threatening” them.
With Ms. Liu handcuffed, seven officers brought her back for the home-ransacking. They didn’t allow her to witness the counting of items confiscated from her, nor was she given a confiscation list. She also paid a 5,000 yuan bail bond and was then released.
Eight months later, on December 18, the village director asked the practitioners to report to the police on December 22. When they went there, the police threatened them that if a prosecutor asked them questions, they weren’t allowed to talk about their arrests or home-ransacking. They could only answer whether they practiced Falun Gong or not. If they said they had stopped practicing Falun Gong, they would be given reduced terms, or they would just wait to be imprisoned.
Before a prosecutor ever contacted the practitioners, the police returned to Ms. Liu and Ms. Zhu’s homes on January 13, 2021, and ransacked their places again. Both practitioners were taken to the police station and ordered to admit that the Falun Gong informational materials found in the village’s apartment building were distributed by them. The two women were interrogated from 2 p.m. to 1 a.m. and then released.
The police took the practitioners to the Shulan City Procuratorate on January 28, and each was interrogated by two prosecutors. Ms. Zhu said she would like to retract her testimony after her arrest, as she made the confession when her mind was unclear after being beaten. Both she and Ms. Liu refused to plead guilty, and maintained that they hadn’t done anything wrong by practicing Falun Gong or raising awareness of the persecution.
Both Ms. Zhu and Ms. Liu went to the Jiaohe City Procuratorate on February 5 and tried to file a complaint against the police for beating them. The prosecutor refused to accept their case and directed them to the police department. They were then given the runaround between the police department’s Appeals Office and Discipline Inspection Commission.
Upon hearing about their complaint, one officer of the Appeals Office reported them to the Domestic Security Office. Sun Jiaqing, the agency’s director, immediately came over and threatened to arrest and imprison the two practitioners.
Both practitioners went to the Shulan City Procuratorate on February 8 and attempted to urge the prosecutor not to indict them. The staff member who received them said there would be no way for the prosecutor to dismiss Falun Gong cases. When the practitioners insisted on meeting with the prosecutor, the staff member said that the prosecutor was out of the office and had gone back home to another city.
A while later, Zhang Fengshuang, the deputy director of the Procuratorate, arrived. Ms. Zhu handed him her complaint letter about the police beating her. Zhang accepted the letter and asked her to go home.
Ms. Zhu and Ms. Liu returned to the Procuratorate in the afternoon and again tried to find the prosecutor. The staff member there refused to talk to them and said their case was very special and had been forwarded to the Jilin City Procuratorate for further instruction (both Jiaohe City and Shulan City are under the jurisdiction of Jilin City).
Ms. Zhu and Ms. Liu received a text message on February 27 from the Shulan City Court, indicating that they had been indicted. Both were taken back into custody at Jilin City Detention Center on March 2 and have since been detained incommunicado. Their families have been kept in the dark as to whether they were sentenced or whether they are still being held at the detention center.
Related report:
Eight Arrested in Two Days, Three of Them Beaten Following an Earlier Arrest
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