Elderly Woman Arrested Late at Night and Detained for a Month for Practicing Falun Gong

(Minghui.org) As soon as Ms. Zhao Fangyu opened her door at 10 p.m. on June 2, 2021, to see off her guest Mr. Li Ganlin, 15 police officers who had been waiting outside barged in.

When Ms. Zhao of Qingdao City, Shandong Province, asked the police why they broke into her private residence at night, they said, “You opened the door yourself.”

After handcuffing Mr. Li and another of Ms. Zhao’s guests, Mr. Fan Yanqi, behind their backs and taking them to the police car, several officers surrounded Ms. Zhao on her sofa, while others searched her place without a warrant.

Ms. Zhao, 73, and her two guests were all targeted for their faith in Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.

Ms. Zhao’s Falun Gong books, DVDs, computer, and cellphone were confiscated. The police ordered Ms. Zhao to sign the confiscation list but didn’t give her family a copy.

The police started to drag Ms. Zhao by her ankles to the police car when she resisted. They took away moments later.

Ms. Zhao and her guests were taken to the Huanxiu Police Station that night and held for 35 days. Mr. Li and Mr. Fan were held in separate rooms, while Ms. Zhao was left to sleep on the floor in the hallway. She wasn’t given any change of clothes during the month-long detention.

The police interrogated Ms. Zhao the next day. She tried to explain that she and her guests didn’t break any law by practicing Falun Gong. The police refused to listen and asked her where she got the Falun Gong books. Two staff members from the Jimo Procuratorate ordered Ms. Zhao to just practice Falun Gong at home and not contact other practitioners.

The police verbally abused Ms. Zhao when she did the Falun Gong exercises. One officer threatened her, “You should feel lucky we’re in the pandemic now. If not, we would have taken you to the hospital for organ harvesting long ago.”

The police did take all three practitioners to two different hospitals for physicals. Ms. Zhao was twice diagnosed with a heart condition. She and her guests also had samples of their blood collected, possibly to be added to the organ harvesting database.

At the same time, Ms. Zhao’s family, who had been kept in the dark about where she was, grew very worried about her. When her son went to the Pudong Detention Center and his wife went to the Huanxiu Police Station to look for her, officials at both places denied that she was detained there.

On July 6, 2021, Ms. Zhao and another practitioner, Ms. Han Zhuqing, were transferred to the Chengyang Police Station and held for three days. They and a third practitioner, Ms. Wang Shuhua, who was taken to the police station earlier, had their clothes stripped off and were forced to squat three times. Ms. Zhao said that they didn’t break any law and asked the police why they were humiliating them in this way. The police responded that this was the rule at the police station. The police also took photos the practitioners against their will and forced them to sign their case documents.

Prior to her latest arrest, Ms. Zhao was followed by plainclothes officers and had photos of her taken when Qingdao was hosting the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s (SCO) in 2018.