Ms. Ma Liqin Beaten into a Vegetative State While in Detention

Ms. Ma Liqin is a Falun Gong practitioner from Heilongjiang Province. She was beaten into a vegetative state at the Beishan No.2 Detention Centre in Qitaihe City in March 2002 by policeman Yin Zhongliang. At present she is still in a vegetative state. She eats only when fed, is incontinent, and her family needs to take care of her around the clock. Her pension is being used to pay her medical bills.

Ms. Ma Liqin is 47 years old. Since practising Falun Gong, her mental and physical condition greatly improved. However, on March 5th, 2002 she was arrested by a policeman from the Dongfeng Police Station, Qin Yong, and sent to the Beishan No.2 Detention Centre.

On March 15th, Ma Liqin was dragged by lead policeman Yin Zhongliang to the office and beaten up. Yin kicked her with leather shoes and knocked her head against the wall. Ma lost consciousness immediately. The police thought she was faking it and kept punching her in the face. They used a needle to prick her right hand and put pills in her mouth to revive her.

When they found Ma did not have any reaction, no matter what they did, Yin asked someone to carry her to a car. At this time, they found that she became completely incontinent, and her trousers were drenched. The driver pinched her philtrum (an acupuncture point), but she still did not wake up. Yin sent Ms. Ma to the Xinxing Police Department, where they saw that Ms. Ma was injured all over her body, and her head was badly swollen. They noticed Yin smelled like alcohol and did not walk steadily, and they expressed displeasure that Yin had interrogated Ma. According to regulations, only the Dongfeng Police Station had the right of interrogation after a legal procedure. The Xinxing Police Department refused to accept Ms. Ma, so Yin took her back to the detention centre. On the way back, although they passed a Chinese Medicine hospital, they did not get treatment for Ms. Ma, nor did they notify her family of her condition.

By the afternoon, her family was told that the police wanted to release Ms. Ma. They hurried to the Dongfeng Police Station and submitted a 1000-yuan¹ deposit to cover the procedure. It was 3:30 pm at that point. Three policemen led the family to the detention centre to pick up Ms. Ma. When they arrived at the detention centre, they found her lying on a sofa unconscious, with her head badly swollen. The detention centre asked the family to pay a 160 yuan accommodation fee to let the family take Ms. Ma away.

The family took Ms. Ma to the Chinese Medicine Hospital. The CT exam revealed a lot of bleeding in her brain. Her face had a large area of hematoma. Her head, back, legs, feet and hands all had apparent trauma. During open skull surgery, the doctor took out 70 millilitres of coagulated blood, but some of it could not be removed.

Ms. Ma remains in a vegetative state. No one can pay her therapy bills. Her family went to appeal many times, going to the city government, the petition office, the Procuratorate, the Heilongjiang Public Security Bureau, and the Heilongjiang Procuratorate. All their efforts have been in vain. Ma's case was also exposed on the Minghui website [Chinese version of Clearwisdom.net].

The Qitaihe Public Security Bureau declared an "investigative conclusion" on March 20th, 2003, which claimed that "there is no proof that Ma Liqin's cerebral hemorrhage was caused by a police beating". However, they agreed to pay part of her therapy fee in the hospital, 30,000 yuan. For this, they required Ms. Ma's son, Zhang Kai, to not appeal anymore; otherwise he would face prosecution.

Note

1. "Yuan" is the Chinese currency; 500 yuan is equal to the average monthly income of an urban worker in China.

Chinese version available at http://www.minghui.org/mh/articles/2008/1/19/170652.html