In mid-February 2001, the Qinghe detention center, (Haidian district, Beijing,) illegally detained approximately one hundred Falun Dafa practitioners from the Tiananmen Square Police Station. The practitioners refused to cooperate with police by withholding their identities; consequently they were tortured both physically and mentally by a variety of methods.
In one instance, policemen whipped a sixty-year old woman with a rubber hose until she collapsed. Then they stomped on her arms and legs and ground burning cigarettes into her flesh, yelling and laughing wildly, "You Dafa practitioners don' t smoke, I want you to taste a cigarette." A policeman also used a dirty, wet mop to crush her head against the floor. When she lost consciousness, they dragged her back into a jail cell. These policemen shamelessly slandered our teacher, desecrated his picture in front of practitioners, and said, "If we beat you to death, we will report it as suicide."
Police severely beat those practitioners who refused to reveal their identities, and in some cases managed to knock out people's teeth. Some practitioners asked, " Why are you doing this? Do you not have any shred of humanity?" They replied, " We just follow Jiang Zemin. Whether you are rehabilitated or not has nothing to do with us. We just follow his orders. There's nothing but dictatorship right now."
We have described only a small portion of the ongoing atrocities at the Qinghe detention center. Many Falun Dafa practitioners are being illegally held here and are suffering brutal persecution.
A practitioner in China on 3/23/01
