Older Hong Kong Falun Dafa Practitioner Ms. Zeng Aihua Sentenced to Three-year Prison Term - Her Relatives Also Persecuted

On February 12th, 2007, the Pudong New District Court of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai sentenced Hong Kong practitioner Ms. Zeng Aihua, 58, to a 3-year prison term.

The Court changed the trial time 3 days ahead of the scheduled date to prevent practitioners from attending. On that day, Shanghai 610 Office¹ personnel guarded themselves as if facing a strong enemy. Several dozen policemen were placed every 2 metres from the Court gate to the tribunal. Outside the Court there were many plain-clothes police officers. In addition, some officers kept practitioners under house arrest, or in police substations. The Court assigned the smallest room to the trial. Zeng's family got audit admissions for only two people. A dozen other auditors were possibly National Security spies.

Zeng Aihua was not allowed to wear her glasses when she was escorted to the tribunal by two policemen. This made her steps unstable and she was unable to recognise her family members. After almost nine months of detention and torture, Ms. Zeng appeared much older but was still calm and spoke with a clear mind.

Li Jianjun, Procurator at Pudong New District Procuratorate, charged Zeng with "publicising Falun Gong." The so-called "evidence" was 159 copies of DVDs with Falun Gong materials stolen from Zeng's residence (detailed content was not disclosed), along with 69 DVDs stolen from Long Xiuyun's residence and 19 DVDs from another practitioner's home. Testimony from a neighbour named Gu Hongliang claimed that he saw Long leaving Zeng's home with the materials.

None of the three witnesses showed up at the trial. It is known that Long Xiuyun also suffered from severe torture. She has been detained since last June and no one has seen her. She is facing trial. Under such circumstances, the so-called testimony lacks credibility. The CCP Court is aware of this, so they revealed Zeng's archive to her defendant lawyer only three days before the trial date, and did not allow the lawyer to discuss the case with Zeng afterwards.

Ms. Zeng admitted that she made the DVDs, but denied that it was a crime. The judge cut her off immediately and told her to tell if the evidence was true or not. Zeng Aihua said, "I have been indifferent to life-and-death for a long time. However, I have been a good law-abiding citizen. It is the country's sadness that today I am standing here being tried. I hope every one of you can show your conscience!"

Ms. Zeng's words touched everyone there. Then her lawyer tried to make an innocent defence for her. But Judge Shi Yaohui hurriedly took out a pre-made judgement statement and sentenced her to a 3-year prison term at the tribunal based on charges of "damaging the country's law enforcement utilising (slanderous words omitted)." The whole trial lasted merely an hour.

Shanghai National Security and 610 Office staff were afraid the news of the trial would be exposed. In order to block anyone from learning of it, they tapped and recorded the lawyer's mobile phone beginning three days before the trial, up to the day that this article was published (five days after). They also interfered with his phone signals, thus making the media unable to interview the lawyer. The home phone and mobile phone of Ms. Zeng's family residence in Shanghai had been tapped secretly. After the trial, the authorities deliberately made noises when tapping the phones, to remind her family of the tapping. The wiretapping even involved her in-laws in Fujian Province.

Ms. Zeng's 70-year old husband, Xu Xuede, had been in a hospital for three weeks. Due to severe arthritis he lost his ability to walk at all. He appeared at the trial in a wheel-chair. The authorities called his hospital the same afternoon of the trial when they learned which hospital he was in, ordering the hospital management to monitor his activities and report to them even after he was discharged from the hospital. The hospital could not take such pressure and discharged Xu the very next day. He has been left without medical treatment and is suffering from unbearable pain day and night. The physical pain along with the sadness of his wife's sentence has made his life unbearable.

The CCP National Security Bureau also reached overseas. Zeng Aihua's daughter, an Australian citizen named Chen Muhan, had been appealing to different people to save her mother. On February 11th, the day before Ms. Zeng's trial, a spy sneaked into Chen's residence in Sydney, unplugged the modem, the router's network cable and power cord, and damaged the adaptor. At present, it is not known if the files in the computer have been duplicated. Several months earlier, web spies hacked into Chen's email box and stole her letters appealing for the release of her mom that had been sent to Hong Kong's chief executive, Donald Tsang, and members of the legislature. Spies posing as Ms. Chen published a letter titled "Chen Muhan: Please help save my Mother" on websites such as Future China Forum. They also deviously changed the return email address in the letter to that of the spies. The letter contains Ms. Zeng's ID card number and personal information, including addresses and phone numbers in Hong Kong and Sydney. The action of the spies violated the privacy rights of Ms. Zeng and her family members. It raised a lot of attention after it was exposed in Australia.

Zeng Aihua is a steadfast Dafa practitioner. During her nine months of detention, she refused to wear a prison uniform, never wrote a guarantee statement promising to give up the practice of Falun Gong, never signed any interrogation records, and never provided any information of other Dafa practitioners to the authorities. Because of this she was subjected to torture. Severely short-sighted, her glasses were taken away when she was first sent to the detention centre. She was forced to labour for long periods of time and her eyesight deteriorated significantly. The detention centre also limited her ability to ask for help from her family for things such as clothes and cash, which caused her life to be difficult due to a shortage of daily necessities in the detention centre. She went on a hunger strike to protest the tortures but details of this are not known. Her case is now being appealed to the Shanghai First Intermediate People's Court.

Pudong New District People's Court in Shanghai: 86-21-38794518, transfer to staff in charge of criminal tribunal, or transfer to Judge Shi Yaohui at ext.11101.

Judge Shi Yaohui: 86-21-68541824

Shanghai First Intermediate People's Court: main number: 86-21-34254567

Note

1. "The 610 office" is an agency specifically created to persecute Falun Gong, with absolute power over each level of administration in the Party and all other political and judiciary systems.

Chinese version available at http://minghui.org/mh/articles/2007/2/23/149525.html