2015-02-26
Li Biyun at a hospital in Guangzhou, Jan. 4, 2015.
RFA
Authorities in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong on Thursday detained around a dozen friends of outspoken rights activist Li Biyun after they tried to visit her home in Shunde city.
Guangzhou-based rights activist Guo Chunping, who was among the group who tried to visit Li, said the group had been detained outside the gates of the residential compound where the activist lives.
“We hadn’t even reached her home … when we saw around 100 plainclothes officers,” Guo, who was detained in a local police station at the time of the interview, told RFA.
“They surrounded us and then they wouldn’t let us go inside,” he said. “They forced us into a minibus and brought us to the police station in Ronggui New Village, Shunde.”
“I think they know very well that Li Biyun made an online invitation to all her friends to join her for dinner,” Guo said.
Guo said police were busy checking the ID cards of Li’s friends and supporters inside the police station at the time of the interview.
“They gave no reason; they just grabbed us and brought us here,” he said. “It was like a kidnapping.”
He said police had initially refused to release the group, in spite of vocal protests that they weren’t suspected of any crime.
“The authorities here in Shunde are very nervous; that’s the way they think,” he said.
However, lawyer Wang Quanping, who was among those detained, said they were released gradually later on Thursday.
Still being watched
Li said her apartment was still being watched by around a dozen police officers later on Thursday after the detentions.
“At most sometimes there are several hundred people out there,” said Li, who was recently admitted to hospital after being dumped at the side of a road from a moving vehicle on her release from detention on Dec. 19.
A Shunde court had found Li guilty of “obstructing civic duties” on that date, but then sentenced her to the amount of time she had already been held, releasing her on the same day.
Li, 47, who has already alleged torture at the hands of prison guards and police, was later admitted to Guangzhou’s Fangcun Charity Hospital after collapsing and losing consciousness several times since her violent release.
She has since been coughing up blood, and is unable to walk due to leg injuries sustained during her “release” from detention, her sister told RFA last month.
Li, who has been targeted by the authorities since she tried to stand as a candidate in local elections in 2011, said she doesn’t understand why she is being targeted.
“I haven’t committed any crime; I am a law-abiding citizen,” she said.
“Why do they attack me, obstruct my attempts to seek medical attention, obstruct my attempts to do anything at all?”
‘Nobody can get through’
