Elderly Couple from Xiangfan City Abducted Numerous Times for Practising Falun Dafa

At 11:00am, May 7, 2002, over a hundred people surrounded the gate of the residence area of Xiangfan Cotton Mill. Approximately eight strong ruffians wearing uniforms started to drag an old female Falun Dafa practitioner into a police vehicle. While she was shouting, "Falun Dafa is righteous!" the female practitioner also clarified the truth to the surrounding people and protested her illegal arrest. Her husband, a practitioner of Falun Dafa and a retired staff member from another factory, grabbed the front bumper of the vehicle and shouted, "Falun Dafa is good!" The vicious policemen shouted to him, "How dare you still say Falun Gong is good!" The husband then spoke to the surrounding people loudly, "Everybody knows that I had a high blood pressure and had a stroke in 1992 and was partially paralysed. Ever since I started practising Falun Gong in 1997, I have been able to walk again. Currently, I haven't taken any medicine for years and have become healthier everyday. I had a pension of merely 200 Yuan per month. This was not even enough for food, let alone enough to buy medicine. It is a fact that practising Falun Gong is making me a good person and is helping me be free of illnesses. You are arresting the good people instead of the bad ones. Who gives you the authority to do this?" The vicious policemen saw that most of the surrounding people appeared to be angry with them, so they released the elderly lady and drove away.

The female practitioner mentioned above is named Hu Gaoying. She is 57 years old and is retired from her job as the president of the shop workers' union of the cotton mill. She is a decent and warm-hearted person. In 1998 after she had retired and despite her own financial difficulties, she donated 200 Yuan, the most in the plant, for the people who encountered losses during a big flood. She always worked hard and was known as a nice person to all. Because of her health problems, including a disease of the stomach and some gynaecological diseases, she started to practise Falun Gong. Practising Falun Gong has made her healthier. In March 2002, she went to Beijing and planned to appeal against the persecution of Falun Gong through legal channels. She was trying to tell the government about the benefits she and her husband had received from practising Falun Gong and how it is beneficial to the country and to the people. She wanted to show that practitioners are only trying to be good people and have good health. Her intention was to call on the government to provide a more tolerant environment for cultivation. However, as soon as she arrived at Tiananmen Square and asked for directions to the appeals bureau, she was arrested. She was then sent back to her hometown and detained for two and a half months. She was expelled from the Communist Party and forced to attend brainwashing classes where she was beaten and tortured for over three months. She was released just before October 1. From then on, the police would come to her home and harass her during nationwide holidays and other politically sensitive days. The police even chased her to a relative's home to arrest her. Just for speaking her mind and being a truthful person, she was forced to leave home to avoid further persecution for almost a year and was unable to go home even on the day of her daughter's wedding.

On March 5, 2002, she came back home. Just as she arrived at the gate of the residence area, the police from the substation in the factory abducted her and sent her to the First City Detention Centre. During her detention, she experienced various kinds of torture, including handcuffing, shackles on her feet and forced feeding through a tube in her nose. She went on hunger strike for 13 consecutive days to appeal her illegal detention. At the end the police saw she was very weak and did not want to take responsibility for her death, so they rushed her home. When she arrived home, she was extremely weak and had oedema in her lower limbs. After practising the Falun Gong exercises she quickly recovered.

During the noon hours of May 7, the couple went to the market to buy some vegetables. When they arrived home, they were arrested again. Now they are illegally detained in the City's Second Detention Centre. Since her daughter is going to give birth soon, their son-in-law has been going to the police substation at the plant everyday to ask for their release. Every time the police have found some excuse not to release them.