falunhr.org 12/05/08

The Chinese government has consistently denied the fact that it uses violence in the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners. However, there is one fact that not even the Chinese government can deny - namely, the massive death rate of Falun Gong practitioners in police custody.

Reliable sources report that, as of February 2002, at least 1,600 Falun Gong practitioners or their immediate family members have died from torture while in police custody. Among these 1,600 cases, we have received detailed information regarding the torture and death of 371 practitioners that was provided by families and friends of the victims. These details paint an almost unimaginable picture of tragedy: some practitioners died within one hour of being in police custody; some died after months of agonizing pain; some died in "water cages" in which the victims were immersed in filthy water for months; additionally, some died from being dowsed with gasoline and set ablaze by the police.

Some of the practitioners died from having their genitals shocked with an electric baton for prolonged periods of time. Others died from skull fractures that resulted from savage beatings.

In extreme cases, an infant as young as 8 months was executed, and a grandmother as old as 75 years was murdered. A disabled man with a hunched back was killed when police tried to forcefully "flatten" his torso, and a healthy man was killed with an overdose of nerve-damaging psychiatric drugs. One man was beaten into a coma and then cremated alive. One woman was tied down "while still conscious" and injected with a euthanasia drug.

These murders and executions are being committed by various police throughout China and they are being driven by the Chinese government, which promises impunity for the perpetrators and punishment to officers who go easy on practitioners. The government's sole objective of this policy of torturing Falun Gong practitioners is to force them to renounce their faith. The police have openly told the practitioners that the only way to be released was to renounce Falun Gong. Otherwise, they would be "slowly tortured to death and [their case would be] written off as suicide." And if this does not indicate that the perpetrators were devoid of humanity, some police have even claimed, "We are reincarnated little devils from hell, and we'll beat you into hell as well."

The mass killings of Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese authorities have been reported by many journalists and human rights organizations. For example, in a Wall Street Journal report on December 26, 2000, Mr. Ian Johnson (who won the Pulitzer Award for International Reporting in his series of reports on the persecution of Falun Gong) wrote:

"WEIFANG, China -- Rising out of the North China Plain...this is an unremarkable Chinese city in every respect but one: local police regularly torture residents to death. Since the beginning of the year, when police killed a 58-year-old retiree, at least 10 more Weifang residents have died in police custody. Weifang, which has less than 1% of the national population, accounts for 15% of those deaths."

Since Mr. Johnson's report, at least 9 additional Falun Gong practitioners have died in the hands of the Weifang police.

To deflect reports like Mr. Johnson's, and to deceive the world, some police stations have released practitioners who were tortured and on the verge of death. Many of them have died within hours of their release. The authorities then claimed that the practitioners died because they refused medical treatment.

The authorities even claimed that Falun Gong practitioners committed suicide while in police custody. Some police have thrown Falun Gong practitioners out of tall buildings and claimed that it was suicide. Some police have also hung the bodies of the practitioners and claimed that they hung themselves.

This "suicide in custody" scheme is ludicrous and transparent, and the responsibility is easy to place. It is, therefore, most unfortunate that some western media have unwittingly fallen for the Chinese government's propaganda, and that the reputations of these murdered practitioners have been smeared after their wrongful deaths.