Practitioners Who Appealed with Ninety-Nine-Meter-Long Banner in Tiananmen Sentenced to Ten Years in Prison

Practitioners Who Appealed with Ninety-Nine-Meter-Long Banner in Tiananmen Sentenced to Ten Years in Prison

On January 1, 2001, dozens of practitioners from all over China together held up a huge banner measuring ninety-nine meters long, on the west lawn of Tiananmen Square. The banner was inscribed with eighteen of Teacher Li's poems. Each poem took a space of five and a half metres. The practitioners walked slowly, holding up the banner. It was a magnificent scene that showed the world the dignity and majesty of Falun Dafa. The evil persecutors of Falun Dafa were scared to death and the followers of Jiang Zemin labelled this event as a national "big case." They mobilized a large police force to illegally search for and arrest those practitioners who participated in this event.

Finally, they arrested fifty-six practitioners around the country, including some practitioners that held up their own small banners. Then the police illegally detained and secretly interrogated the practitioners at Division Seven of the Ministry of Public Security. After eight months of illegal detention and interrogation, on August 17, 2001, the Beijing City Dongcheng District Law Court illegally and secretly sentenced these practitioners. The number of the Sentence Statement was 1458. Among the practitioners, Beijing practitioner Shao Jun and Shandong Province practitioner Qiu Xiuxin were illegally sentenced to ten years of imprisonment. Shandong Province practitioner Suo Zhenjiang and another practitioner were illegally sentenced to eight years of imprisonment. Shandong Province practitioner Wang Jian and another two practitioners were illegally sentenced to seven years of imprisonment and two years of attainder [deprivation of political rights, i.e., the rights to vote or be voted to public office, etc.] The other forty-nine practitioners were illegally sentenced to four years and three and a half years of imprisonment, respectively. Qi Kun and his brother, the employees of an art gallery that helped make the banner, were illegally sentenced to one year of imprisonment even though they are not Falun Gong practitioners.

The practitioners refused to accept the sentence because it violated the Constitution and the Criminal Law. The Law Courts didn't follow the judicial procedures nor did they have a judicial basis [for the sentence]. So the practitioners appealed to the Beijing City Secondary Law Court. However, nobody dared to uphold justice or appeal the unfairness under the political gang of Jiang Zemin and Luo Gan's power hungry dictatorship and heavy-handed policies. Their appeal was denied on September 27, 2001. The Secondary Law Court changed the number of the Sentence Statement from 1458 to 1473, but didn't carry out any further investigations. It is obvious that Jiang Zemin and his associates can simply do whatever they want, in whatever way they like when persecuting Falun Gong.
Now, most of the practitioners are illegally detained in the Beijing City Qinghe County Dongcheng District Police Custodial Center. The Beijing police are planning to send the practitioners to labour camps in different parts of the country. We are calling upon kind-hearted people for immediate help.

Posting Date: 12/6/2001
http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2001/12/6/16549.html
http://minghui.cc/mh/articles/2001/11/30/20642.html