February 20, 2000

[1] Mr. Liu Xu-guo Tortured to Death

Mr. Liu Xu-guo and other three practitioners from Zhou-cheng City went to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong in last October. They got arrested and detained in the local detention center and had suffered all kind of tortures. Three months later, they were transferred to Ji-ning detention center. They started hunger strike to protest the illegal detention. Four days later, they started to lose strength and suffer dehydration. Their lives were on the line. However, the authorities of the detention center still forced them to do hard labors such as carrying sand bags. A practitioner lost consciousness on the fourth day of hunger strike and later the authorities sent him to the hospital affiliated with the Ji-ning medical school to be forced-fed. After 6 days of hunger strike, Mr. Liu was also force-fed. In the process of force-feeding, Liu's respiratory tract was injured, which made his lung getting severely infected. On February 11, 2000, he died in that hospital. The authorities had tried to cover his death.

[2] Arbitrarily Detention; Stiff Fines; Confiscating Personal Properties

Around the Chinese New Year, the local public security officers in Ji-ning City started to arbitrarily detain Falun Gong practitioners. They detained every practitioner who was suspected to continue to practice Falun Gong, to keep Falun Dafa materials, to have contact with practitioners in other places, or to have signed the appealing letters. In ten days, they detained about 200 to 300 practitioners. Meanwhile, they ransacked their homes and confiscate many personal properties such as TVs, VCRs and Cellular Phones etc. They also imposed stiff fines on them. Each of them and their workplace were required by the City government to pay 5,000 Yuan and 10,000 Yuan respectively in order to get released. The public security officers were very enthusiastic in doing this and treated this as a way of gaining profits. The stiff fines brought great difficulty to those practitioners who already lost their jobs because of practicing Falun Gong.

[3] Practitioners Abused in Mental Hospital

The police officers sent those practitioners who had been detained beyond legal time limit to the local mental hospital and forced them to accept the "treatments". Many hospital staff members monitored them and forced them to take medicines and injections of large dosage. In a dozen of days, a normal person would be tortured to such an extent that he/she would lose strength all over the body and have a wan and dull look. Some would have their tongue pulled out and looked like a real lunatic. A practitioner had been abused in the hospital for over one month, and looked the same as a lunatic upon getting out of the hospital. Without the permission from the public security department, the hospital refused to release the practitioners. Seven practitioners including Wang Ji-ming, Li Feng-zhi and Lu Dong-mei had suffered this kind abuse in this hospital.