(Minghui.org) Minghui.org recently confirmed that a married couple in Jiexi County, Guangdong Province, were both sentenced for their shared faith in Falun Gong, a mind-body practice that has been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party since July 1999.
Ms. Wen Fenhua, around 60, was given five and a half years. Her husband, Mr. Yang Yingpeng, received five years. Both were also fined 20,000 yuan.
Ms. Yang is likely still held at the Jiedong Detention Center, and her husband at the Jiexi Detention Center.
Ms. Wen was arrested by officers from the Mianhu Town Police Station after 1 a.m. on July 25, 2024. It is unclear where the arrest took place. As dawn broke, more than twenty officers raided her home. They arrested her husband and confiscated two boxes of Falun Gong informational materials.
Both Ms. Wen and Mr. Yang had been on the police radar for practicing Falun Gong. According to an insider, their latest arrests were triggered after Ms. Wen was reported for giving a delivery worker an amulet bearing messages about Falun Gong.
This is not the first time that the couple have been targeted for their faith. They both took up Falun Gong in 1998 and soon regained their health. Mr. Yang, in particular, no longer suffered from frequent migraines as a result of a head injury. He and his wife, who ran a steel business together, strove to be better people by following Falun Gong’s principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. Once, they were overpaid several thousands of yuan, but they returned it as soon as they became aware of the mistake.
Because of their faith, the couple have been arrested multiple times since the onset of the persecution, with Ms. Wen once given two years of forced labor. They were brutally tortured in detention. After one arrest on May 30, 2005, Ms. Wen was taken to a brainwashing center. She was abused to the point of being on the verge of death and sent back home on July 17, 2005. She could not open her eyes and she was unable to move. There were needle injection marks on her wrists and the back of her hands. Mr. Yang suspected that she had been injected with toxic drugs while in detention. There were numerous wounds on her legs, some of which oozed blood. Mr. Yang took meticulous care of his wife, on top of tending to their four young children. She eventually recovered and resumed her efforts to raise awareness of the persecution of Falun Gong.
For details of the couple’s past persecution, see the related reports below.
Related Reports:
Guangdong Couple Arrested Again for Their Faith in Falun Gong
Falun Gong Practitioners Subjected to Injections of Nerve-Damaging Drugs