Experiences of Torture at the Gongzhuling City Police Department and Detention Centre

On May 30, 2002, four plainclothes police officers arrested me without showing any ID. I got free and ran toward the street while the three police chased me. I lost my shoes running and the police finally caught me. They dragged me by my neck and threw me in a police vehicle. They twisted my arms and handcuffed me. The passersby were astounded and speechless at the strong-arm behaviour being displayed in broad daylight. Inside the police car, I saw a female practitioner being detained.

After arriving at the police department, three police officers dragged me to the interrogation room on the second floor. They cuffed my hands to a metal chair, shackled my legs, and then they began to torture me to obtain a coerced confession. They first took away my mobile phone, two pagers and more than 300 Yuan in cash which they found on me. Wang, a deputy team head, started interrogating me but I refused to cooperate with them. Soon, two police officers in their 20's came in, one fat and the other thin. They started to torture me without saying anything. They ripped out tufts of my hair, twisted them into a rope and shoved it in my ear. They kept poking at the opening of my ear canal with the hair rope they made. I felt like I was struck by a thunderbolt in my head, and my head was buzzing. I was nauseous and felt like dying. As they were doing this, the two police grinned fiendishly and said, "Why do you practise Falun Gong? It's better to kill, to commit arson and to rape a woman than to practise Falun Gong." They lit a cigarette and put it under my nose until my head was engulfed in smoke. Tears gushed from my eyes and I couldn't breathe. [Note: Falun Gong practitioners do not drink alcohol or smoke. Police often try to force-feed practitioners alcohol or force cigarettes on them as means to degrade them and as a method of torture].

One police officer sat on a stool, smoked a cigarette and inserted another two lit cigarettes into my nose, which caused the inside of both my nostrils to become severely burned. He said to another officer, "We'll let her have a pack of cigarettes today." They lit yet another cigarette and began burning my nails one after another. He kept blowing on the cigarette to increase the size of the burning ember, until eight of my fingernails fell off. My heart shrunk and I was dizzy and nauseous.

Another police officer came in and slapped me. He grabbed my hair and twisted me around in a circle by my hair. I had lost consciousness at this point. The fat police jumped at me and kicked my face with his foot, aimed a 500 Watt light into my eyes, and he scorched his belt with the light (I heard the sizzling of the belt from the scorching). Then he put the belt onto my back, which caused severe burns on my back that left scars and are still visible to this day. When I was having difficulty breathing and could not walk, two officers carried me into a police vehicle and drove me to a detention center. Chen, the detention centre deputy head slapped my face twice and shouted, "I can't beat you outside of the detention centre, but I'll kill you here." He ordered inmates to carry me to the "Dead Person's Bed"*. Chen ordered the inmates to search me and took away 1,700 Yuan cash from my pockets.

The authorities then began the long-lasting force-feeding which they used as a means to torture me. They jammed a hard white plastic tube down my nose and into my stomach, which severely damaged the inner lining of my stomach and caused stomach mucosa to fall off and led to profuse bleeding. It felt like I was choking on water as tears streamed down my face and my throat hurt terribly. Half of the plastic tube was in the stomach and half of it was left outside of my nose. Whenever I moved my head slightly, I would feel extremely nauseous. I could neither swallow nor spit. They left the tube in my stomach 24 hours a day, to maximize my pain. After I was put on the bed and stretched out, my back hurt as if it was going to break and I was fixed on the bed and couldn't make the slightest movement. I had to endure this in addition to the pain from the stomach tube. During the long time of force-feeding, every night, I heard the police cursing, beating, torturing and force-feeding people in other cells and the painful crying from the practitioners.

After several days, police officer Zhu Qiang and guard Hou came into my cell and force-fed me cold water. First, Zhu Qiang jumped into the bed and asked inmates to hold me down. Then he began forcing cold water into my stomach. He clearly knew that just prior to this I was fed 2 pounds of salty rice porridge, and he fed me another 2 liters of cold water and lied to the inmates that it was glucose water.

Twenty-eight days later, the guards found I was having irregular heartbeat and my life was at risk. In order to avoid taking responsibility, they forced the family of another Dafa practitioner to sign a paper on my behalf and told the family, "Not a problem. Take her out! You won't be held responsible for anything, even if you threw her out and she died."

I was thus released. They had wrongly suspected I was another Dafa practitioner (they were looking for) and sentenced me to two years of forced labour. In fact, during my detention they had already discovered that I was not the practitioner they wanted. I didn't give them a confession. They couldn't find anything that linked me to the truth-clarification materials they found, but they sentenced me anyway.

* "Dead Person's Bed" - The four limbs of the practitioner are stretched out and tied to the four corners of an icy-cold metal bed. The practitioner cannot move at all. Neither is he allowed to get up to eat, drink, or go to the toilet. This treatment lasts from several hours up to over a week. This type of agonizing torture severely hurts the practitioner, both mentally and physically.

Chinese version available at http://minghui.org/mh/articles/2004/2/18/67754.html