The Epoch Times

Sep 01, 2004

An elderly Falun Gong practitioner demonstrates a torture method used on Falun Gong practitioners in China, August 29, 2004, in front of the Waldorf Hotel. The Falun Dafa Information Center's latest press release contains graphic evidence of how the persecution is wrecking lives. (ClearWisdom.net)

It is not the kind of publicity that China wants or needs at the tail-end of the 2004 Olympics in which they placed third overall, and leading into the 2008 Olympics in which Beijing will be host: shocking photographs of emaciated and seriously injured Falun Gong practitioners who were tortured while being illegally held in police custody in China.

The photos, recently released by the Falun Dafa Information Center in New York (FDI), show the graphic human results of China's government-sanctioned persecution of Falun Gong in the form of two victims, Ms. Wang Xia and Mr. Zhang Zhong.

According to FDI reports, Ms. Wang, incarcerated in a forced labor camp (Laogai) in Mongolia for openly talking about Falun Gong in public, was injected with unknown drugs, force fed, shocked with electric batons, hung and beaten after going on a hunger strike to protest being detained. Wang, who once weighed 120 pounds, is now only 45 pounds and has difficulty maintaining consciousness.

Eyewitnesses told FDI that while Wang was still in police custody a prison official told several guards, "Move her to the mortuary for cremation."

FDI says that Mr. Zhang Zhong, arrested in 2002, had attempted to expose human rights abuses against Falun Gong practitioners by tapping into a cable TV broadcast signal to show programs about the banned practice.

After being arrested, Zhang was shackled, hung up, and pricked with needles until he vomited blood, and he can no longer digest solid food and vomits whatever he eats.

Despite some international efforts to inspect conditions in China's forced labor camps, the Chinese government has consistently refused to allow such inspections. Many human rights activists, reporters and others inside of China who have attempted to expose the human rights violations in China's forced labor camps have been captured and incarcerated themselves for attempting to "expose state secrets".

FDI reports that although they have not been able to secure any video recordings or photographic evidence of torture while it is happening, dozens of photographs of injured victims have been taken and shown to the world after the victims are released because they were on the brink of death.

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