(Minghui.org) The police in Shouguang City arrested a retired oil field engineer as he was telling people why the persecution of Falun Gong is wrong at a local fair. The police later ransacked his home and put him in the City Detention Center.
Mr. You Yunsheng is in his 70s, and both he and his wife, Ms. Li Suzhen, are practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual discipline that has been persecuted in China since 1999.
Mr. You was scheduled to be tried on September 8. The details of his trial remain to be investigated. While he was in detention, his wife suffered a serious brain malady and couldn’t care for herself.
Mr. You once relied on various medications just to stay alive. After he became a practitioner in 1996, his ailments disappeared. He was very healthy and looked much younger than his age. His wife also recovered from many of her chronic illnesses because of the practice.
After the persecution started, the police ransacked the couple’s home many times. Prior to his most recent arrest, Mr. You had been detained four times and imprisoned for a total of six years for refusing to give up his belief. He was brutally tortured while he was imprisoned and was rushed to an emergency room in critical condition 12 times. His wife was arrested three times and imprisoned for four years.
For more details, see Shandong Practitioner You Yunsheng Sues Jiang Zemin for Torture, False Imprisonment.
In March 2015 a police officer caught Mr. You telling a driver at a local bus station about Falun Dafa. A dozen more officers were called to drag Mr. You to Chengqu Police Station. At the station an officer punched Mr. You in the face and head until he lost consciousness and fell down. He was taken to a hospital and had very high blood pressure. The police released him only because the staff at the detention center refused to admit him because of his health.
When Mr. You was arrested at the bus station, his wife came over and the police arrested her, too. Criminal charges were brought against her and she was incarcerated in Weifang Detention Center. Her blood pressure became dangerously high when she was tortured. Her lawyer requested medical bail on her behalf, but it was denied.
Ms. Li was tried on July 13, 2015, but her family and lawyer were not notified. Ms. Li was charged with “using a cult to undermine law enforcement," a false charge often used by the Chinese communist regime against Falun Gong practitioners. Her lawyer argued that there is no law in China that criminalizes Falun Gong and that Ms. Li should not have been prosecuted in the first place. How could a 70-year-old woman, he argued, harm anyone or “undermine law enforcement” by telling others about Falun Gong?
When the witness for the prosecution took the stand, the witness described Ms. Li as having “gray hair.” In all the prosecution’s photos, Ms. Li had black hair.
After a year of illegal detention, Ms. Li was released in April 2016.
