2014-07-16
Police take away a petitioner in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Dec. 4, 2013.
AFP
Twelve people are in hospital in Beijing after two mass suicide attempts apparently triggered by failure by the authorities to look into their grievances, including forced evictions, witnesses said.
Five petitioners from the southwestern province of Guizhou on Wednesday attempted suicide in a Beijing police station by drinking pesticide simultaneously, an eyewitness said.
The five, who had pursued complaints against local government officials to no avail and were in the process of being detained at a Beijing police station, downed the pesticide within a few feet of an Anhui petitioner surnamed Zhu.
"There was an iron railing between us, and they were outside the security checkpoint and we had already passed through it," Zhu said.
"Then they drank the pesticide and fell to the floor."
She said one of the women had remained conscious briefly.
"We asked her where she was from, so we could send out a tweet on their behalf," Zhu said. "She said a couple of things, and then white foam started coming out of her mouth and she fainted away."
Photos blocked
Zhu said police at the scene had stopped people from taking photos of the petitioners.
"When they fell to the floor, all the petitioners gathered round and started shouting, but the police corralled us and wouldn't let us see," Zhu said.
"One policeman saw me taking photos and dragged me into an office where he snatched my cell phone and deleted the photos," she added.
An officer who answered the phone at the Fuyou Street police station on Wednesday declined to comment on Zhu's account.
"I don't know about this," the officer said, before hanging up the phone.
Earlier, seven petitioners from the eastern province of Jiangsu had staged a similar collective suicide bid outside the offices of the China Youth Daily newspaper group.
"They have all been taken to hospital," an employee who answered the phone at the newspaper offices said on Wednesday.
But she declined to comment further. "I don't know about this," she said.
Media reports said the five men and two women from Qingyang township in Jiangsu's Sihong county had been taken to a nearby emergency room after swallowing liquid pesticide.
Black jails
Complaints documents found on the petitioners indicated they were pursuing a complaint about forced eviction from their homes last year, and had been locked up in an unofficial detention center, or "black jail," by local officials in retaliation.
China's army of petitioners frequently report being held in "black jails," beaten, or otherwise harassed,if they persist in a complaint beyond its initial rejection at a local level.
"They probably had reached the end of the road and the end of all hope," a petitioner from the northeastern province of Liaoning surnamed Zhao told RFA.
"There are a lot of journalists outside a newspaper office, so it's pretty sensitive, and there is a chance it will get reported," he said.
"If they did it outside a government building, the authorities would lock down any information about it, and it would have all been for nothing."
Attempted suicides are growing increasingly common among disgruntled petitioners, many of whom are forced evictees, and most of whom pursue complaints against local officials for years or even decades with no result.
