(Minghui.org) What looked like group calisthenics being held on a chicken farm in the Heilongjiang Prison was not what it seemed at a distance.

Prison guards and inmates held weapons in their hands and surrounded Falun Gong practitioners, who were forced to run in circles. As the practitioners ran by each guard or inmate, the weapons landed on them: whips, sticks, tree branches, police batons, electric batons and handcuffs.

Ms. Ma Shuhua (马淑华) revealed the above torture scene after she recently survived a 10-year term at the Heilongjiang Women's Prison. It took place on September 5, 2003. Practitioners who refused to run were handcuffed to iron window bars, shocked with electric batons, and struck repeatedly.

As a result of torture suffered there, Ms. Ma could hardly walk on her own, let alone run. The prison division chief ordered six inmates to run and drag her along. Ms. Ma's feet were festered and bleeding, her shoes damaged. The guards laughed uproariously as she hobbled along.

Ms. Ma recalled being surrounded by some inmates and slapped many times. A guard shocked her in the face with an electric baton. Seeing that she was too exhausted to react to it, he yelled, “This baton is too small. We'll get a more powerful one tomorrow!”

The guards referred to the torture method as “drill.” It lasted for 11 days, until September 15.

The practitioners were all exhausted by the end of the day. Their faces and bodies were covered with bruises, and they couldn't walk properly. However, they were not allowed to rest after they went back to their cells.

They were forced to sit on the cement floor, and were beaten if anyone closed their eyes. The guards held the practitioners' eyelids open with toothpicks, poked their feet with electrified needles, and struck their knees with wooden sticks.

Ms. Ma's feet were swollen, and her shoes were soaked red from blood. She had to go barefoot in the following days after her feet started oozing pus. Guard Zhang Chunhua (张春华) stomped on her feet with heels and ordered two inmates to do the same. The stomping came to an end after Ms. Ma lost consciousness. She lost all ten toe nails within the next two weeks.

Heilongjiang Women's Prison

Practitioners were forced to sit still on small stools from 6:00 am to 9:00 pm every day for the following month. They were forced to listen to inmates reading slanderous materials about Falun Gong. Many practitioners' buttocks festered from the prolonged sitting.

Ms. Ma joined other Falun Gong practitioners in holding hunger strikes to protest the persecution. The guards began force-feeding practitioners on the third day. The mixture was one bag of milk powder and two bags of salt.

After a feeding tube was taken out from one practitioner's body, it was inserted into another's stomach through the nose, without washing or sanitizing. Some practitioners' noses kept bleeding after the force-feeding.

The guards later left the tubes inside the practitioners' bodies for as long as a week. The tubes were black by the time they were taken out.

Zheng Jie (郑杰), chief of the 8th Division, yelled, “Make it harder! If they die from force-feeding, we will simply throw them outside our walls like dead chickens!”

Ms. Ma suffered such force-feeding for 28 days.

She was arrested on April 22, 2002 and sentenced to a ten-year prison term after being tortured by the “Harbin 610 Office Special Task Force” for about a year.

During the ten years at the Heilongjiang Women's Prison, she suffered various kinds of brutal torture, including beatings, electric shock, brainwashing, sleep deprivation and forced-feeding. She was transferred there in June 2003.