A recently released Guangzhou lawyer, who was detained by Chinese authorities for posting a message about the Jasmine Revolution, has broken his silence about the mistreatment during his 108 days in detention.
Liu Shihui, a civil rights lawyer from Guangzhou, hasn’t been heard from for over 3 months since his arrest on Feb. 25.
Five days previously, on Feb. 20, Liu wrote on Twitter: “I am having a date with Miss Jasmine at People’s Park in Guangzhou at 2 p.m., Feb. 20. There is nothing private about it, onlookers are welcome.”
On his way to the park Liu was apprehended and beaten by men believed to be plainclothes police. During the beating Lui’s feet were fractured, and he was sent to a hospital. From then on, the outside world lost all contact with him.
After 108 days in detention, Liu was “released on bail” on June 12 and banished to his ancestral hometown in Inner Mongolia.
But on the afternoon of Aug. 21, Liu started posting messages on Twitter, talking of some of the ordeals he suffered while in jail, including torture, having his house confiscated, and his wife–a native of Vietnam–being deported.
In his first message Liu recalled the day when he was arrested. At around 2 a.m. on Feb. 25, police broke into his home after smashing in the iron door. They took away his computer, books, CDs, files, U-disk, mobile phone, the stock machine, and more.
Both he and his new Vietnamese wife were arrested.
Liu said he repeatedly pleated with the police to go easy on his wife, telling them that she is a foreigner who doesn’t speak Chinese, and asking them to show legal documents for her arrest. But they still took his wife away, saying it was in response to a “crime call.”
Liu’s wife was deported to Vietnam after being illegally held for 17 days.
Life Destroyed
After being arrested, police interrogated Liu day and night and deprived him of sleep for five continuous days. His injured left leg became swollen to twice its normal size, Liu wrote on his Twitter.
But what pained him the most was to lose his wife and his home, and the uncertainty of how his wife was being treated, he said.
“My wife was in their hands for 17 days. What happened during that time? I know nothing at all.”
Liu said, in addition, domestic security officials made up lies about him to his wife. They told him later that, when they deported his wife, they told her he was being charged with a financial crime because he had cheated someone.
“It implied that I am a swindler. My marriage dream is broken. I’ll harbor a grudge for life. What breaks my heart most is that my newly-married wife does not even know why I wasarrested. She left China with misunderstandings.”
Liu also found after his return that everything on his computer had been wiped out. All of his personal and work-related data, about 50-60 G was deleted, and his hard drive was changed.
“That’s my entire legal career of more than a decade and my entire private world. All is gone,” Liu said.
Liu said he is now seriously ill and has trouble sleeping. He said in addition to his wife and the house being gone, he is also being deprived of collecting legal fees of more than 300,000 yuan (approximately US$47,000). When he was banished from Guangzhou, it meant all his ownership rights there were gone.
Liu added that the things he exposed were only a little bit of what happened, but he feels better after speaking out as otherwise he fears he might have “exploded,” he said.
After the popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the Chinese Communist authorities have been extremely fearful of the same thing happening in China. Human rights lawyers, who dared to speak out, have gone missing one after another after February.
Bao Tong, political secretary to former [ousted] Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang, once said, “If lawyers can’t be free of fear, this country has big problems.”
Read the original Chinese article
