(Minghui.org) A Jingmen City, Hubei Province resident has been detained for nearly a year for his faith in Falun Gong, a mind-body discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.
Mr. Zhang Jingzhou and Ms. Shao Lian, 76, were arrested on August 27, 2019 by a dozen officers in a place that they rented to print informational materials about Falun Gong. Due to strict information censorship in China, many Falun Gong practitioners are operating home-based printing centers to produce materials to raise awareness about the persecution. The police confiscated more than twenty cases of printing paper, five printers, two computers and a paper cutter.
The two practitioners were then brought to the Jingzhou No.1 Detention Center and interrogated. Ms. Shao was tied up in a chair for more than 30 hours, resulting in pain all over her body. She was formally arrested on October 8. It’s not clear whether she is still detained at the time of writing.
Mr. Zhang has remained in custody since. When his lawyer visited him on December 18, 2019, he told the lawyer that the police handcuffed him for nearly eight hours after his arrest and his right arm almost lost feeling when the handcuffs were removed. One day in late September 2019, the detention center guards denied him food and water for more than nine hours, while locking him in an interrogation chair and verbally abusing him. He filed a complaint about the mistreatment to the procuratorate on September 30, but never received any response.
Prior to his latest arrest, Mr. Zhang had been arrested several times. He served two labor camp terms for a total of 3.5 years and a prison term of 5.5 years. His wife divorced him in 2000 due to pressure from the persecution.
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