(Clearwisdom.net) [Note: The following is a shortened version of a longer and more detailed article that appeared on the minghui.ca website (Chinese version of Clearwisdom.net).]
The police from the Yingtai District of Tongchuan City in Shaanxi Province arrested 60-year-old Ms. Xu Guifang in June 2007 when she was visiting another Falun Gong practitioner. They held her in the Tongchuan Jail for over four months. Without notifying her family members, they sentenced her to three years in prison on October 5, 2007. They did not inform her family of her prison sentence until the night before they sent her to the prison, when the ten-day time limit for appealing had expired. Ms. Xu is now imprisoned at the Ninth Branch of the Strictly Controlled Team of Shaanxi Women's Prison.
Ms. Xu's eldest daughter, Ms. Liu Chunxia, a worker at the Tongchuan Construction Company, was once arrested because she practiced Falun Gong and was sentenced to three years in prison. At that time her son was only one year old. Ms. Liu was persecuted in the Shaanxi Women's Prison and became mentally disoriented and was released a year early. Ms. Xu was also sentenced to one-and-a-half-years of forced labor at that time, and they were forced to stay away from home after their release to avoid arrest. But later Ms. Liu's mental condition worsened, which forced her to return to Xian Psychiatric Hospital for treatment. Within half a month of her returning to Tongchuan where she got better, she was arrested again and persecuted.
Practitioner Ms. Xie Xiuying, a retired worker from Sanlidong Mine of the Mine Bureau of Tongchuan City, was arrested when she was distributing truth clarifying materials at Wangjiahe Village in Tongchuan City in January 2007. After being held in jail for a few months, she was sentenced to four years in prison and sent to Shaanxi Women's Prison.
