Seventy-Year-Old Woman Mistaken as Falun Gong Practitioner, Beaten to Death

The night before the closing of the Chinese Communist Party's Fourth Central Meeting, authorities in Benxi City, Liaoning Province initiated a massive search for Falun Gong practitioners. The city police department ordered all branch offices to submit a list of arrested Falun Gong practitioners to see if they had met their quota. To make the quota, on the night of September 18, officers from a local police station arrested a 70-year-old woman by the name of Wang Lianying. Unable to bear the torture, she died during interrogation.

Upon hearing the news, Wang's family was furious. On the morning of September 19, as a protest, they left wreaths in front of the police station, and strung a banner across the street that read, "Give Back Our 70-Year-Old Mother." That day, over 70 relatives from Wang Lianying's family staged a mourning ceremony outside the police station. With hundreds of spectators and bystanders, the traffic was in complete chaos. Later, they hung a banner across the hospital saying, "Knowing the law yet breaking the law, the police treat human lives like straw."

Wang Lianying had taken up Falun Gong before July 20, 1999 for health reasons. However, she stopped practising after the persecution of Falun Gong began. On September 18, 2004, she was arrested while sleeping, taken to the police station, and beaten to death on the same day.

The bystanders remarked that, in the past, they did not quite believe the flyers about the brutality of the police distributed by Falun Gong practitioners. However, after witnessing this incident themselves, they said that all the other things written about the crimes of the police must also be true.

Someone then brought up another recent incident in which a woman (not a Dafa practitioner) was arrested for alleged prostitution. Failing to force her to admit to the charge, which the woman strongly denied, the police beat her, stripped her naked and shocked her nipples and genitals with an electric baton. As the police could not find evidence of the charge, they finally released her. The woman's sister was infuriated by this and appealed to higher authorities, but was forced by the chief police officer to drop the case. One person remarked, "If we allow things like this to carry on, the little confidence we have left in the government will vanish."

Chinese version available at http://minghui.ca/mh/articles/2004/10/7/85931.html