(Minghui.org) The Lixia District Court in Ji’nan City recently approved the local procuratorate’s request to withdraw its indictment against a local woman arrested for her faith.
Ms. Liu Pinjie was seized on December 27, 2014, while talking to shoppers at a supermarket about the Chinese communist regime’s persecution of Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline based on the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance.
The 76-year-old retiree of Ji’nan Semiconductor Research Institute was indicted on February 14, 2016, and soon released on bail. Her family learned recently that the Lixia District Procuratorate’s request to drop her case has been approved by the local court.
This is not the first time that Ms. Liu has been targeted for her faith. She served three years of forced labor between 2001 and 2004, during which time she was brutally tortured.
Her husband, Mr. Zhang Xingwu, also practices Falun Gong. He was a physics professor at Ji’nan Normal University, but he was demoted and saw his pay cut after the persecution of Falun Gong began in 1999. He was also given three years of forced labor in 2001, just like his wife. Police arrested him again on July 16, 2008, and sentenced him to 7 years in prison.
The couple’s daughter, Ms. Zhang Shuangying, who works in the U.S., has been calling for her parents’ release all these years, but her father wasn’t released until his term expired on July 16, 2015. The 78-year-old man, however, returned home to find his wife arrested again months earlier.
Ms. Zhang continued her efforts to seek her mother’s release, and the local Ji’nan authorities finally dropped the case against Ms. Liu.
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